Associate Director of Cloud Platform FinOps Lead

About Kirkland & Ellis

At Kirkland & Ellis, we are united in our ambition and drive to move forward. We share core values that help us achieve excellence: collaboration, talent empowerment, service, inclusion, respect and gratitude. Our people are our greatest asset, and we invest in the brightest talent and encourage a diversity of perspectives and strengths to create dynamic teams that operate at the pinnacle of their field. Our talented professionals show up every day knowing they will engage in meaningful work, continuous learning and professional development.
 
As one of the world’s leading law firms, we serve a broad range of clients with market-leading practices in private equity, M&A and other complex corporate transactions; investment fund formation and management; restructurings; high-stakes litigation and trials; and government, regulatory and internal investigations. We handle the most complicated and sophisticated legal matters because we don’t just meet industry standards, we create them. We bring innovation and entrepreneurialism to every engagement and, as a result, have long-standing client relationships with leading global corporations and financial sponsors. With 6,500 employees (including 3,500+ lawyers) operating from 19 offices across the United States, Europe and Asia, we are one of the largest law firms in the world and a top financial performer.

Essential Job Functions

This is a technical associate director role. This role is responsible to manage, track and optimize the cost of cloud adoption in Azure, M365 and other Cloud SaaS Platform resources, services & build cost consumption model while working with other Kirkland leaders on roadmap development, implementation of services in cloud platforms. To be successful in this role, an Associate Director of Cloud Platform FinOps Lead should have strong leadership and communication skills, as well as a deep technical understanding of M365, Azure and ServiceNow platform related technology trends, information architecture, Cost Management tools and technologies.  Additionally, this role should be able to think strategically and work collaboratively with other departments to achieve the organization's goals.

Essential Functions: (This list is not exhaustive and may be supplemented and changed as necessary.)

• Requires the ability to lead this area with little to no guidance; able to collaborate with others to set direction, goals and objectives and then lead the team to achieve them.
• Responsible for developing and implementing a robust program for cloud cost management that includes: a service-based cost allocation and classification strategy, tracking and management of cloud costs, cloud services rates settings, and defining consumption and show-back/charge-back reports from both the provider and consumer perspective.
• Shares a collective responsibility with peers within the organization for the end-to-end lifecycle management of the service or product we are delivering.
• Contributes and delivers against the organization priorities and roadmaps.
• Creates and setup business objectives, Cloud cost optimization framework, measurements (KPIs) and reports
• Develop and/or lead change management efforts across all phases of projects and initiatives to drive the Firm’s culture of continuous improvement.
• Set objectives for measuring cost controls with various service teams
• Work with application owners to measuring consumption and optimization worked on continuously
• Partner with finance team for reporting, invoicing models
• Work with business units to develop budgeting, forecasting, and reporting of billing
• Establish strong cost management practice in the Public Cloud for Azure and M365 and other Cloud platforms including SaaS
• Identify opportunities for cost optimization; Analyze public cloud service providers financial reports and identify opportunities for optimization
• Optimize Cloud costs by defining / tracking cost plans, reserved Instances, enterprise saving plans
• Day to day monitoring and tracking of cloud costs
• Define cloud cost performance KPIs and track against agreed KPIs on a regular basis
• Implement cost optimization and governance strategies for continuous cost optimization
• Help define, implement, maintain and automatically remediate tagging standards for Azure and other cloud Platforms
• Good understanding of billing on cloud platforms (incl. impact of usage patterns on TCO)
• Ability to develop effective reporting schemes/metrics to maintain strong control on usage and billing of cloud services
• Ability to liaise with multiple stakeholders (across IT, finance, business functions) and proactively identify opportunities for service improvement

Qualifications & Requirements

Education, Work Experience, Skills

Required:

• 10+ years of experience in cost management for Azure, Enterprise M365 Platform, and other SaaS Platforms.
• Experience with capacity forecasting, cloud cost optimization techniques, financial reporting, and workflow management in a large service operations environment
• Familiarity with monitoring and reporting tools/APIs
• Ability to support agile decision making across multiple cloud services, with short-cycle analytics and problem solving
• Demonstrated skills in working across multi-functional teams to bring increased business value through seeing the bigger picture, collaboration and alignment of diverse needs
• Excellent communication, diplomacy, and interpersonal skills.
• Proven change management skills. 
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to work effectively with business and IT cross-functional teams.
• Experience leading a team of 3rd party architects, and technology subject matter experts.

Preferred:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems, data science, or related field.
• Strong presentation skills
• Vendor management
• Work experience at a large professional services organization or Law firm

Certificates, Licensures, Registrations

• Preferred: M365 and Azure Certifications including Security & Governance
• Preferred: Any Azure Cloud Service Provider certification related to Data/Information capability

Tools and Equipment

• Microsoft office automation tools (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, MS Project), Erwin, Visio

How to Apply

Thank you for your interest in Kirkland & Ellis LLP.  To complete an application and submit your resume, please click "Apply Now."

Equal Employment Opportunity

All employment decisions, including the recruiting, hiring, placement, training availability, promotion, compensation, evaluation, disciplinary actions, and termination of employment (if necessary) are made without regard to the employee’s race, color, creed, religion, sex, pregnancy or childbirth, personal appearance, family responsibilities, sexual orientation or preference, gender identity, political affiliation, source of income, place of residence, national or ethnic origin, ancestry, age, marital status, military veteran status, unfavorable discharge from military service, physical or mental disability, or on any other basis prohibited by applicable law.

Closing Statement

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