Team Leader - Enterprise Cloud Services (FinOps)

Wellmark, Inc. • Des Moines, IA

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

In this formal leadership role, you will lead a high‑performing FinOps‑focused cloud team responsible for maximizing the value, efficiency, operational health, and financial transparency of the organization’s cloud ecosystem. This role emphasizes cloud financial operations alongside strong cloud operational discipline, ensuring the organization is getting the most value from its cloud platforms and environments while maintaining accountability for annual cloud spend. You will oversee the ongoing operation, optimization, and reliability of cloud platforms, balancing cost, performance, availability, and security, and ensuring cloud services are operated in a scalable, resilient, and well‑governed manner.
You will partner closely with system owners, product owners, solution architects, and technology leaders to evaluate cloud usage and architectural decisions across ecosystems and align spend to business outcomes. A core responsibility for this role is enabling system owners (Directors) with the tooling, data, and insights needed to actively manage their cloud budgets, transitioning from soft budgets to clear financial ownership and accountability.
This role develops people, fosters a collaborative and inclusive culture, and ensures the team operates effectively within an agile framework, while bringing a finance‑ and analytics‑driven perspective that complements existing technical leadership. As a key member of the enterprise cloud leadership team, this leader will help shape and execute a forward‑looking roadmap.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, or related field, or direct and applicable work experience.
• Minimum 7 years of experience in cloud engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure roles.
• Informal leadership experience typically gained through project management or by coaching/mentoring others by providing guidance and feedback to help an employee to strengthen their knowledge and skills.
• Experience leading teams in an agile software development environment. Experience with frameworks in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), supporting Agile Release Trains and aligning designs with Lean-Agile principles.
• Demonstrated ability to build product roadmaps.
• Hands on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP services and architecture.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform, CloudFormation) and container orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes).
• Strong collaboration skills with ability to build relationships across technology divisions.
• Proven experience leading platform/shared service teams, either informally or formally, and delivering enterprise-scale solutions. Ability to think strategically and effectively communicate strategy and direction to a team.
• Stays informed on emerging technology trends and skillsets. Proven experience implementing change initiatives and supporting a culture of innovation and creativity. Encourages team to accept and resolve challenges.
• Ability to think strategically to communicate, organize, and implement/accomplish long-range goals.
• Effective consulting, critical thinking, and problem solving skills. Uses data effectively and demonstrates sound judgment and decision making to drive positive outcomes.
• Demonstrated success influencing at all levels of the organization. Builds trust, alignment, commitment, and action from others.
• Prior experience measuring and evaluating work processes to achieve organizational goals.
• Proven ability to be adaptable to unexpected changes or situations. Adjusts effectively to work within work structures, business processes, work requirements and culture.
• Travel required up to 5%.

Nice To Haves

• Background in finance, analytics, cloud financial operations, or technology‑adjacent financial leadership, with the ability to operate effectively in a cloud engineering environment
• Experience owning, managing, or influencing large‑scale technology or cloud budgets
• Strong analytical mindset with experience using data and tooling (e.g., Power BI or similar analytics platforms) to drive financial and operational decision‑making
• Ability to evaluate cloud platforms and environments from a value, cost‑benefit, and optimization perspective, not solely technical design
• Experience working in regulated industries (e.g., healthcare, finance)
• Familiarity with FinOps concepts, cloud cost governance, and usage‑based pricing models
• Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert
• Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator Associate
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
• AWS Certified Security – Specialty
• FinOps Certified Practitioner
• Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP)
• Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK)
• CompTIA Cloud+
• ITIL 4 Foundation

Responsibilities

• Provide leadership and day-to-day management of financial and human resources, primarily focusing on employee coaching, development, performance improvement, coordination and budgeting for staff and team specific services. Support business objectives and produce results that are effective, accurate, and timely and on target to meet HR team and stakeholder needs.
• Ensure the team delivers incremental value aligned to cloud strategy, product roadmaps, and stakeholder needs. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to remove impediments and improve delivery velocity.
• Translate business objectives into actionable cloud initiatives and resourcing plans.
• Oversee delivery of cloud solutions using AWS, Azure or GCP, ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture and security standards.
• Partner with architects to review designs and ensure solutions meet performance, cost, and compliance requirements.
• Champion automation, infrastructure-as-code, and DevOps practices to improve efficiency and reliability.
• Monitor cloud spend, capacity, and performance, proactively addressing risks and cost optimization opportunities.
• Serve as a liaison between the cloud engineering teams and senior technology leadership.
• Other duties as assigned.

What This Job Offers

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