FinOps Solutions Architect, Principal

Pacific Gas And Electric Company • Oakland, CA

30d • $155,000 - $265,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

The FinOps Solutions Architect, Principal is a strategic leadership role within PG&E’s Technology & Security Organization. The role establishes a consistent, structured approach to managing cloud costs and AI token consumption, and is accountable for architecting FinOps platform engineering, AI cost management, tokenomics, automation, and cost-aware cloud and AI architecture.

The position designs and scales operational frameworks, architectural patterns, and data pipelines to control AI costs, optimize token usage, and enforce governance across AWS and Azure. It develops FinOps capabilities, tooling, data workflows, cost attribution, unit economics, and automation, while advising and coaching engineering, product, finance, procurement, and application teams. The role also collaborates with cloud service providers and vendors, supports FinOps team development, and ensures that cloud infrastructure and AI solutions incorporate cost optimization, security, data governance, and relevant compliance standards.

The headquarters location is flexible within the Bay Area Region, to be agreed upon by the hiring leader and successful candidate. The hybrid arrangement involves working from a remote office and in person at the Oakland Corporate Office 1–2 times per week, or as business needs or company requirements dictate.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or an engineering-related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Cloud certification such as Azure Solutions Architect Expert, AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate, or equivalent.
• 10 years of IT experience, including cloud FinOps or data engineering, with at least 2 years focused specifically on AI/ML workloads and LLM infrastructure.
• 7 years of architecture or software development experience.
• 3 years of cloud architecture experience.

Nice To Haves

• FinOps Professional certification and a track record of building chargeback and data quality frameworks from scratch.
• Deep knowledge of AWS Cost & Usage Report (CUR), Azure Consumption Sheets, Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, Azure OpenAI, and Azure AI Studio.
• Understanding of LLM application architecture, including tokenizers, vector databases, API gateways, and orchestration frameworks such as LangChain and LlamaIndex.
• Strong SQL, Python, and cloud billing data pipeline skills.
• Ability to explain technical token mechanics as financial risk assessments for executive stakeholders.
• Expert communication skills and ability to influence stakeholders to prioritize FinOps outcomes.
• Experience working with or leading an offshore team and interacting with technical teams, finance, and accounting stakeholders.
• Experience with FinOps tools and technologies such as AWS Cost Explorer, Microsoft Cost Management, and custom FinOps dashboards.
• Familiarity with building automations and managing cloud infrastructure.
• Familiarity with outcomes achievable through Python, SQL, or cloud-native automation features for identifying strategic automation opportunities.
• Experience with process improvement and defining and documenting cloud cost policies and procedures.
• Experience working with large data sets and tagging.
• Ability to prepare and present technical material to audiences ranging from application developers to executives.
• Experience forecasting AWS and Azure generative AI services.
• Experience with Power BI and other dashboarding tools.
• Experience building dashboards and reports with FOCUS data.
• Familiarity with HashiCorp Terraform.
• Familiarity with ServiceNow.
• Professional or Specialty AWS certifications and Intermediate or Advanced Microsoft certifications.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and scale operational frameworks, architectural patterns, and data pipelines to control AI costs, optimize token usage, and enforce governance.
• Design and implement complex architectural solutions using cloud design principles, best practices, and industry standards.
• Build an enterprise-wide framework to track LLM token consumption across AWS and Azure services.
• Define and implement real-time rate limiting, token throttling, and multi-cloud model-routing policies to control costs.
• Define AI-specific unit metrics to measure business return on investment.
• Lead complex cost-benefit modeling and map results to business KPIs.
• Educate and coach teams on FinOps best practices and cloud architecture, including hands-on coaching for the Cloud Center of Excellence.
• Ensure cloud infrastructure design, development, and delivery incorporate FinOps principles and continued cost optimization.
• Develop strategies for integrating FinOps data and practices into the development lifecycle.
• Collaborate with cloud service providers and FinOps tool vendors to mature capabilities, increase adoption, enable cost optimization, and shift work left.
• Design and develop data pipelines to ingest, process, and transform data from AWS and Azure into actionable insights.
• Configure and administer FinOps tooling and implement new tools, including integrations with Azure and AWS.
• Develop scripts and tools to automate deployment, monitoring, and scaling processes.
• Consult with application and business teams to ensure solutions incorporate FinOps principles, optimize costs, and address identified gaps.
• Assist in defining additional technical FinOps roles and support candidate profile reviews, interviews, and selection.
• Optimize and fine-tune data workflows for high performance and reliability.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate data requirements into scalable, efficient data solutions.
• Implement security measures and data governance practices to maintain data integrity and compliance.
• Troubleshoot and resolve data-related issues.
• Consult on defining and maintaining a scalable FinOps tagging policy for accurate cost attribution.
• Consult on identifying and tracking FinOps performance metrics and KPIs and optimization opportunities.
• Ensure compliance with relevant industry standards and financial regulations.
• Automate cost management workflows, including anomaly detection and billing adjustments.
• Work with engineering teams to automate operational cost optimization practices.
• Advise engineering, product, finance, and procurement teams on cloud financial management.
• Stay current with AWS and Azure technologies and industry best practices to improve data engineering processes.

Benefits

• Eligible to participate in PG&E’s discretionary incentive compensation programs.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal