FinOps Lead

Job Description

At OVO, we are on a mission to solve one of humanity's biggest challenges, the climate crisis. And we know it takes all of us to change the world. That's why we need diverse people from all abilities, gender identities, ethnicities, ages, sexual orientations, life experiences and backgrounds to join us.

Teamworking for the planet

Everything we do here spins around Plan Zero. So, naturally, the team you’ll be joining plays a gigantic role in making that happen. Here’s how:

The Infrastructure & Enablement team is crucial to OVO's success, directly impacting its mission to achieve Carbon Zero by providing cloud-native platforms, resilient infrastructure, and efficient engineering solutions. As the FinOps Lead, you'll be a key member of this team, reporting to the Director of Infrastructure and Enablement. Your primary responsibility will be to ensure we are driving value for money and innovation within our cloud infrastructure. You will work closely with the engineering community to embed cost-conscious practices, and your efforts will directly contribute to the financial health of the business and our journey towards greater efficiency.

This role in a nutshell

The FinOps Lead is a crucial role within the Infrastructure & Enablement team, focused on driving financial efficiency across our multi-cloud environment. You'll blend technical expertise with financial acumen to optimise cloud spending, automate cost-saving solutions, and cultivate a culture of cost-consciousness within our engineering teams. A key part of this will be ensuring the correct and efficient use of cloud technologies, which directly contributes to our carbon reduction goals by minimising wasted resources and energy consumption.

Your key outcomes will be

Financial Management & Optimisation

• Lead the analysis and management of our cloud spend across GCP, AWS, and Azure.
• Develop and implement strategies to optimise cloud costs, including identifying waste, rightsizing resources, and leveraging discount programs like GCP's committed use discounts (CUDs) and AWS Savings Plans.
• Collaborate with finance and senior leadership to create accurate and data-driven cost forecasts and budgets for all cloud services.
• Financial usage forecasting for long term commitments.

Operational & Programmatic Solutions

• Work hands-on to create and maintain automated dashboards and reporting tools that provide real-time visibility into engineering costs for both technical and financial stakeholders.
• Partner with our SRE and development teams to embed cost optimisation principles and best practices directly into our development lifecycle and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) pipelines.
• Champion programmatic solutions to common FinOps challenges, such as implementing automated shutdown scripts for non-production environments or creating self-service tools for developers to monitor their own costs.
• Budget Tracking and anomaly detection.

Education & Culture

• Act as an evangelist for FinOps, educating engineers, product managers, and other stakeholders on the financial impact of their technical decisions.
• Help define and document best practices for resource tagging, management, and governance to improve cost visibility and accountability.

Vendor & Stakeholder Management

• Maintain regular engagement with our cloud provider account teams (GCP, AWS, Azure) to stay informed on new services, pricing models, and optimisation opportunities.
• Work closely with procurement and legal teams on contract management, renewals, and consolidation for our cloud services.

You’ll be a successful FinOps Lead at OVO if you…

• You're a Proactive Problem-Solver: You're highly analytical and enjoy digging into data to identify and solve complex cost and efficiency problems before they become major issues.
• You're a Collaborative Communicator: You can effectively bridge the gap between technical and non-technical teams, influencing a culture of cost-consciousness across the organisation.
• You're a Hands-On Builder: You aren't just an analyst; you have a technical background and Cloud experience with a passion for creating programmatic, automated solutions to drive efficiency and carbon reduction.

Let’s talk about what’s in it for you

We’ll pay you between £60,000 and £84,000, depending on your specific skills and experience.

We keep our pay ranges broad on purpose to give us, and you, flexibility to match your experience to our zero carbon mission.

You’ll be eligible for an on-target bonus of 15%. We have one OVO bonus plan that focuses on the collective performance of our people to deliver our Plan Zero goal.

We also offer plenty of green benefits and progressive policies to help you feel like you belong at OVO…and there’s flex pay. We'll give you 9% Flex Pay on top of your salary – 4% of this is auto enrolled into your pension, and the remaining 5% is yours to do what you like with. You can use this to buy from our extensive range of flexible benefits, including our green benefits which we've put at the heart of our offering, add to your pension or even take it as cash.

Here’s a taster of what’s on offer:

For starters, you’ll get 34 days of holiday (including bank holidays).

For your health
With benefits like a healthcare cash plan or private medical insurance depending on your career level, critical illness cover, life assurance, health assessments, and more

For your wellbeing
With gym membership, travel insurance, workplace ISA, will writing services, dental insurance, and more

For your lifestyle
With extra holiday buying, discount dining, home & tech loans, and supporting your favourite charities with give-as-you-earn donations

For your home
Get up to £400 towards any OVO Energy plan, plus great discounts on solar, smart thermostats and EV chargers

For your commute
Nab a great deal on ultra-low emission car leasing, plus our cycle to work scheme and public transport season ticket loans

Want to hear about our full range of flexible benefits and progressive people policies? Our People Team can tell you everything you need to know.

For your Belonging

To find better ways to support our people, we need to listen to each other’s experiences and find ways to build a truly inclusive and diverse workplace. As part of this, we have 8 Belonging Networks at OVO. Led by our people, for our people - so when you join OVO, you can play a part - big or small - with any of the Networks. It's up to you.

Oh, and one last thing...

We’d be thrilled if you tick off all our boxes, yet we also believe it’s just as important we tick off all of yours. And if you think you have most of what we’re looking for but not every single thing, go ahead and hit apply. We’d still love to hear from you!

If you have any additional requirements, there’s a space to let us know on the application form; we want to make the process as easy and comfortable for you as possible.