Lead Cloud Economist

Arctic Wolf, with its unicorn valuation, is the leader in security operations in an exciting and fast-growing industry—cybersecurity. We have won countless awards for our excellence in security operations and remain dedicated to providing an industry-leading customer and employee experience.

Our mission is simple: End Cyber Risk. We’re looking for a Lead Cloud Economist to be part of making this happen.  

About the role

Our systems run globally, process hundreds of billions of events per day, and are still seeing exponential growth. It’s easy to see the need for a dedicated Financial Operations team to provide reporting, governance, and insight into the cost of running those systems and the factors that influence our cloud spend. You will join our FinOps team, bringing experience in cloud cost reporting, data analysis, and AWS cloud hosting services to support operations within Product, Engineering and Finance. The information and insights you provide enable stakeholders across the organization, from individual contributors to C-level executives, to be more informed and make data-driven decisions.

 Your responsibilities include:

• Cost Analysis and Optimization: Conduct in-depth analyses of cloud spend across services and environments to identify cost-saving opportunities and recommend optimizations.

• Financial Modeling: Develop predictive financial models to project cloud spend based on usage trends, application growth, and strategic initiatives.

• Spend Analysis: Utilize tools like AWS QuickSight, CloudWatch, and Cost Explorer to track, analyze, and project spend for various breakdowns of cloud spend.

• Stakeholder Collaboration: Partner with R&D, finance, and business teams to align cloud cost initiatives with organizational goals and operational requirements.

• Cost Anomaly Management: Own cost anomaly detection, alerting, and response processes, partnering with engineering teams to confirm root causes and validate resolutions.

• Forecasting: Partner with finance teams to develop cost forecasts and projections, compare forecasts to actual spend and understand causes where there are differences.

• Savings Plan Management: Oversee commitment-based discounts (CSPs, RIs, etc.), managing procurement, monitoring usage, and optimizing renewals.

• Policy Creation and Compliance Oversight: Audit and enforce comprehensive cloud cost governance policies, ensuring adherence across business units and instilling cost-conscious practices.

• Continuous Improvement: Iterate on cost management processes by implementing new tools, refining existing workflows, and incorporating feedback to keep pace with evolving cloud technologies and usage patterns.

• Team Advocate: Act as a team representative in cross-functional initiatives.

• Reporting: Maintain and administer our cloud cost reporting platform.

• Commitment Tracking: Manage cloud vendor discount plan commitments and purchases.

About you

• Fluent in data, finance, and tech.

• Excellent written and oral communication skills and a proactive nature.

• Strong analytical skills with experience using data analysis tools.

• Have experience working with BI tools like Quicksight (preferred), Tableau, Power BI, or Superset.

• Practical knowledge and experience with AWS products and services, pricing models and cost management capabilities.

• Proficient in gathering information from various sources, combining, analyzing, presenting the results and linking them to the larger context and business outcomes.

• Strong attention to detail, ability to identify discrepancies and outliers.

• Experience designing reporting and monitoring to ensure awareness of cost trends and drivers.

• Have developed and maintained complex models to explain and accurately predict cost.

• Experience in cloud expense reporting and management using FinOps disciplines within a cloud platform.

• Working Python and SQL knowledge preferred.

• Bonus: Experience with cloud infrastructure capacity planning and rightsizing.