Staff Cloud Solutions Engineer - Azure

Role Overview The Staff Cloud Engineer - Azure FinOps is the FinOps subject-matter expert embedded with Product and Engineering. You own how Azure billing actually works across every commercial construct Microsoft sells through — and how cost gets allocated, recovered, and reduced on top of it. Azure billing is not one system. An EA enrollment, an MCA billing account, a CSP/partner-managed tenant, and an MSP-resold estate expose different hierarchies, data shapes, and discount mechanics. Someone who has only rightsized VMs has not done this job. We need someone who has stood inside these billing models, reconciled them against invoices, and built showback and chargeback a finance team accepted. Key Responsibilities Azure Billing and Commercial Models (Primary) Own the product's model of Azure billing across EA, MCA, CSP/Partner-led, and MSP-resold estates — including where each behaves differently and what breaks when you assume they don't Define how the platform represents the billing hierarchy: EA enrollment → departments → accounts, and MCA billing account → billing profiles → invoice sections → subscriptions Specify handling for discounts, credits, refunds, and adjustments — negotiated pricing, partner earned credit, promotional and sponsorship credits, commitment drawdown, service credits, mid-cycle corrections Reconcile usage data against invoices; define product behavior when they disagree, and where amortized, actual, and effective cost must be reported separately Map billing roles (Enterprise Admin, Billing Profile Owner/Contributor, Invoice Section Reader, Partner Center roles) to what the product can see at each tier Allocation, Showback, Chargeback, and Budgets Design allocation models that survive real estates — tag, subscription, and management-group driven — with a defensible method for shared and unallocatable cost Define showback and chargeback as separate product behaviors with different accuracy and auditability bars; specify markup and margin handling for MSP/CSP resale Own reservation and Savings Plan benefit attribution and amortization presentation Own budget design across all Azure scopes, with actual vs. forecasted alerts, action groups, and automated response; set a real signal-to-noise bar for anomaly detection Cost Optimization Define and validate optimization recommendations — rightsizing, idle and orphaned resources, disk and snapshot cleanup, SKU upgrades, storage tiering, Log Analytics ingestion, egress Own commitment strategy: RI and Savings Plan coverage, utilization, breakeven, scope choice, exchange and refund rules, Azure Hybrid Benefit Set the accuracy bar for every savings claim the product makes — the calculation, the assumptions, and what makes it defensible to a CFO Product Partnership and Engineering Act as the technical authority on Azure cost and billing behavior for PM and engineering; turn Cost Management, Consumption, Billing, Partner Center, and Retail…