Director, FinOps & AI Cost Engineering (Hybrid Preferred)

Achieve Business Value Through AI

The Director, FinOps & AI Cost Engineering will lead a unique practice at the intersection of engineering, finance, procurement, and AI platform operations. This role requires a blend of financial acumen and technical fluency.

Key Responsibilities

• Stand up and lead an AI FinOps practice spanning cloud infrastructure, on-prem infrastructure, SaaS, vendor spend, model API usage, and token-based AI workload economics
• Build and scale the FinOps capability from the ground up, establishing foundational practices, tooling, and operating rhythms
• Define the operating model, governance, and decision rights for AI and tech cost accountability across products, platforms, and shared services
• Create core economics frameworks for AI-enabled technology services, including cost per inference, cost per agent run, cost per workflow, cost per active user, and cost per business outcome
• Develop dashboards, scorecards, and reporting that make cloud and AI economics understandable to both technical and executive audiences
• Identify and drive optimization opportunities across cloud consumption, commitments, rightsizing, storage, SaaS usage, model selection, prompt design, retrieval strategies, and inference patterns
• Partner with engineering and architecture leaders early in design decisions to shape solutions for both technical performance and economic efficiency
• Embed cost transparency and economic efficiency into engineering decisions early in the lifecycle
• Deploy AI-powered workflows and agents to automate core FinOps activities, including anomaly detection, optimization recommendations, contract analysis, tagging enforcement, and forecasting support
• Reduce manual reporting and repetitive analysis through scalable automation and agency operating models
• Establish guardrails and controls for autonomous or semi-autonomous FinOps actions
• Partner with Procurement, Finance, Architecture, and platform leaders on cloud, AI, and SaaS commercial strategy
• Support commitment planning, vendor negotiations, renewal strategy, and commercial restructuring
• Improve value realization from hyperscalers, model providers, and platform vendors through disciplined governance and measurable performance tracking

Qualifications

• Undergraduate degree or equivalent experience
• 10+ years of experience in FinOps, cloud economics, technology business operations, platform economics, or closely related technology leadership roles
• 5+ years of leadership experience managing cross-functional initiatives, programs, or teams in a large enterprise environment
• Solid understanding of public cloud cost drivers, including compute, storage, networking, commitments, reservation strategies, and utilization optimization
• Strong working knowledge of AI/ML workload economics, including model APIs, inference patterns, token-based cost drivers, GPU/accelerator usage, or comparable AI platform economics
• Experience partnering with engineering, architecture, finance, procurement, and vendor teams to influence both technical and commercial decisions
• Proven ability to create executive-ready reporting and translate technical spend patterns into business decisions
• Experience with dashboards, telemetry, and cost observability tooling that supports chargeback/showback, forecasting, and optimization

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or deploying AI-enabled automation, agents, or copilots in a production or enterprise setting
• Experience in FinOps using data to drive recommendations to lower costs and improve efficiency
• Experience leading major cloud commitment restructures or platform modernization efforts
• Familiarity with model selection tradeoffs, prompt/inference optimization, RAG economics, and agent runtime design considerations
• Solid point of view on the future of AI cost attribution, agent ROI, and cloud-to-AI spend convergence

Benefits

We offer a comprehensive benefits package, incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase, and a 401(k) contribution. No matter where or when you begin a career with us, you'll find a far-reaching choice of benefits and incentives. The salary for this role will range from $134,600 to $230,800 annually based on full-time employment. We comply with all minimum wage laws as applicable. At UnitedHealth Group, our mission is to help people live healthier lives and make the health system work better for everyone. We are committed to mitigating our impact on the environment and enabling and delivering equitable care that addresses health disparities and improves health outcomes - an enterprise priority reflected in our mission.