FinOps AI & Optimization Practitioner

Your day at NTT DATA
The FinOps AI & Optimization Practitioner will enable financial transparency, accountability, and optimization across cloud, on-premises, and AI services. The role will help the organization understand, govern, forecast, and optimize consumption across traditional infrastructure and emerging AI workloads, including token-based services, GPU-intensive workloads, AI platforms, and SaaS-based AI capabilities.

The mission is to drive cost-efficient and accountable technology adoption by aligning usage, performance, risk, and business value. The FinOps AI & Optimization Practitioner collaborates closely with engineering, finance, procurement, operations, product teams, and business stakeholders to embed FinOps practices into daily decision-making and support scalable, responsible AI adoption.

This position is based in Veldhoven, Netherlands and follows a hybrid working model requiring office presence three days per week.

Key Responsibilities

• Drive cost optimization across cloud, on-premises, SaaS, and AI services by identifying savings opportunities, validating business impact, and supporting implementation with accountable owners.

• Establish FinOps for AI practices covering AI cost visibility, allocation, forecasting, budgeting, anomaly detection, unit economics, cost-per-token, cost-per-inference, GPU utilization, and AI business value tracking.

• Proactively equip, guide, and train stakeholders on FinOps, cloud optimization, and AI cost management practices through the Community of Practice.

• Ensure reliable cost management tooling, including access control, data quality, cost mapping, tagging/labeling standards, dashboards, reporting, and vendor engagement for improvements.

• Identify, analyze, and report cost opportunities and risks across Azure, Google Cloud, on-premises, and AI consumption; partner with stakeholders to remediate actions and track benefits.

• Manage commitment-based savings instruments such as reservations, committed use discounts, savings plans, and AI/GPU capacity commitments in alignment with workload demand and risk.

• Support budgeting, forecasting, showback, chargeback, and business case creation for cloud migration, workload modernization, and AI initiatives.

• Define and track KPIs that improve accountability and value realization, including spend variance, forecast accuracy, optimization execution, workload efficiency, AI unit costs, and realized savings.

• Collaborate with internal teams and external providers to understand pricing models, SKU changes, capacity constraints, licensing impacts, and optimization levers.

• Stay current with FinOps, cloud pricing, AI service pricing, GPU infrastructure, token-based consumption, sustainability, and industry best practices.

To thrive in this role, you need to have:

• Minimum 5 years of experience in FinOps, cloud cost management, IT finance, cloud operations, platform engineering, or a related role in an international IT organization.

• Strong understanding of Azure and Google Cloud cost models, cloud principles, reservations/commitments, tagging, allocation, forecasting, budgeting, showback, and chargeback.

• Experience translating technical usage into financial insights and actionable recommendations for non-finance stakeholders and business owners.

• Experience with cost visualization and analytics tools; ability to create dashboards, reports, and insights that support decisions.

• Experience with change management, stakeholder enablement, governance, and optimization execution in large organizations.

• Experience with AI cost drivers such as tokens, API calls, model selection, inference, training, GPU/TPU usage, vector databases, SaaS AI licensing, and shared AI platforms is preferred.

• FinOps Practitioner certification, or willingness to obtain it; AI/cloud optimization certifications are a plus.

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in System Engineering, Business Management, Data Analytics / Data Science, Finance, IT, or equivalent experience

Personal Skills

• Strong analytical, documentation, communication, and presentation skills.

• Ability to simplify complex technical and financial topics for diverse audiences.

• Forward thinker with a practical optimization mindset and focus on measurable value.

• Strong stakeholder management, expectation management, and collaboration skills.

• Self-motivated team player with attention to detail and ability to deliver reliable results with limited supervision.

• Curious and adaptable, with strong interest in cloud, AI, automation, and evolving technology cost models.

Success Measures

• Improved transparency and accountability for cloud, on-premises, and AI spend.

• Realized optimization savings and reduced avoidable waste across technology consumption.

• Reliable forecasting, budgeting, and chargeback/showback support for business stakeholders.

• AI spend governed through meaningful KPIs such as cost-per-token, cost-per-inference, GPU utilization, forecast variance, business value, and anomaly response.

• Higher FinOps maturity through stakeholder training, policy adoption, and continuous improvement

Workplace type:

Equal Opportunity Employer
NTT DATA is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer with a global culture that embraces diversity. We are committed to providing an environment free of unfair discrimination and harassment. We do not discriminate based on age, race, colour, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, disability, pregnancy, marital status, veteran status, or any other protected category. Accelerate your career with us. Apply today