Dir Financial Operations

HMH is a learning technology company committed to delivering connected solutions that engage learners, empower educators and improve student outcomes. As a leading provider of K-12 core curriculum, supplemental and intervention solutions, and professional learning services, HMH partners with educators and school districts to uncover solutions that unlock students’ potential and extend teachers’ capabilities.

HMH serves more than 50 million students and 4 million educators in 150 countries. For more information, visit www.hmhco.com

We are building an enterprise FinOps capability to strengthen the financial management of HMH's technology run-rate. Reporting within the CIO organization, the Director of FinOps will lead the practices, operating cadence, analytics, and governance required to understand, forecast, and optimize recurring technology spend, with primary focus on Cloud, AI, and SaaS.

This is a FinOps leadership role with strong technology fluency, not a cloud engineering or architecture role. The successful candidate must understand how technology consumption and commercial models drive cost and be comfortable working with technical teams and consumption data. Deep engineering expertise is not required. The role's primary value is translating usage, demand, contracts, and technology decisions into financial visibility, forecasts, optimization actions, and better business decisions.

A central part of the role is working directly with Budget Owners and Contract Owners. Budget and Contract Owners retain accountability for their budgets, business needs, vendor relationships, and contractual decisions. FinOps provides the financial intelligence, governance, forecasting, utilization analysis, optimization insight, and operating cadence that enables those owners to manage spend effectively.

The scope includes cloud infrastructure and platforms, AI models and services, SaaS applications, data and observability platforms, security tooling, and other material recurring technology services. HMH operates a hybrid environment today and is working toward greater use of AWS over time, making both current-state run-rate management and forward-looking migration economics important.

What You Will Do:

Own technology run-rate visibility. Establish and maintain a consolidated view of recurring technology spend across Cloud, AI, SaaS, and other material technology services. Provide clear visibility into actuals, budget, forecast, commitments, utilization, major cost drivers, and emerging financial risks.

Lead the FinOps operating model. Establish and mature HMH's FinOps strategy, governance, processes, standards, and accountability mechanisms. Define practical approaches for cost ownership, allocation, tagging, showback, forecasting, optimization tracking, and financial performance measurement.

Partner with Budget Owners. Establish a regular operating cadence with technology Budget Owners to review actual spend, run-rate, forecast, variances, demand changes, optimization opportunities, and corrective actions. Help owners understand what is driving their spend and provide the analysis needed to keep financial performance aligned with plan.

Partner with Contract Owners. Work with Contract Owners, Procurement, Vendor Management, and Finance to connect consumption and utilization data to contract commitments, renewals, pricing structures, and sourcing decisions. Provide early visibility into underutilization, overconsumption, redundant capabilities, renewal exposure, and commercial optimization opportunities.

Optimize Cloud spend. Partner with Engineering, Architecture, and platform teams to identify and financially evaluate rightsizing, idle resource reduction, storage and database optimization, commitment utilization, platform consolidation, and other Cloud optimization opportunities. Technical teams determine and implement appropriate engineering actions; FinOps quantifies the opportunity, tracks execution, and validates financial realization.

Manage AI economics. Build visibility into AI-related consumption and run-rate, including model and API usage, tokens, agent execution, AI platform licensing, GPU or compute consumption, and other material AI services. Develop appropriate attribution and unit economics, forecast adoption-driven cost, identify abnormal consumption, and establish financial guardrails before usage outpaces visibility.

Optimize SaaS economics. Develop visibility into SaaS spend, license utilization, product tiers, overlapping capabilities, contractual commitments, and renewal timing. Partner with Contract Owners and Procurement to identify rationalization, consolidation, renegotiation, and license optimization opportunities.

Forecast and plan. Lead technology run-rate forecasting and support budgeting and scenario planning. Incorporate known business demand, product adoption, seasonality, technology roadmaps, migration activity, contract changes, and AI adoption into forward-looking forecasts. Continuously improve forecast accuracy and explain material variances.

Track savings through realization. Maintain a disciplined optimization pipeline from opportunity identification through owner assignment, action, implementation, and validated financial realization. Distinguish between theoretical savings, cost avoidance, negotiated savings, and savings that actually appear in financial results.

Inform executive decisions. Give the CIO and Technology Leadership Team a clear view of technology run-rate, forecast performance, optimization progress, realized savings, commitments, utilization, and emerging financial risks. Translate complex consumption and financial data into concise recommendations and decisions.

What You Bring:

Core FinOps depth (primary requirement):

• 8+ years of relevant experience across FinOps, Cloud Financial Management, TBM, technology finance, financial analytics, SaaS economics, or related disciplines, including experience operating or leading a FinOps or technology cost management capability at meaningful scale.
• Demonstrated experience with forecasting, budgeting support, cost allocation, optimization, commitment management, variance analysis, and savings realization.
• Experience partnering directly with Budget Owners, Contract Owners, Finance, FP&A, Procurement, Vendor Management, and technology teams.
• Working experience with FinOps platforms such as Finout, CloudZero, Apptio Cloudability, CloudHealth, Harness, Kubecost, or comparable technologies.
• Strong analytical capability with cloud billing, SaaS licensing, contract, utilization, and other technology consumption datasets.
• Ability to translate financial and technology consumption information into practical recommendations, actions, and executive-level insights.
• Strong communication and stakeholder-management skills, including the ability to challenge assumptions with data while maintaining shared accountability with spend owners.

Technology fluency (required, but this is not a pure technical role):

• Working knowledge of public cloud economics and commercial models, particularly AWS, with familiarity with at least one additional major cloud platform desirable.
• Understanding of how cloud architecture, engineering practices, AI adoption, SaaS usage, and technology demand influence consumption and cost.
• Comfort working with technical teams and interpreting consumption data without needing to be the engineer or architect responsible for designing the underlying solution.
• Familiarity with AI consumption models, including APIs, tokens, models, agents, platform licenses, and compute-intensive workloads.
• Proficiency with analytical and reporting tools such as Power BI, Tableau, SQL, Python, APIs, or comparable technologies is valuable; hands-on software engineering is not required.
• Bachelor's degree in Finance, Economics, Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Business, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.

Nice to Have:

• FinOps Foundation certification and/or relevant AWS, Azure, or GCP credentials.
• Experience managing or analyzing generative AI costs, AI API and token economics, AI platform licensing, GPU infrastructure, or agentic workloads.
• SaaS optimization, software asset economics, license rationalization, and technology vendor negotiation experience.
• Experience with cloud commitments such as Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, committed-use agreements, enterprise discounts, and marketplace consumption.
• Migration economics, including modeling the financial impact of moving workloads from data centers to public cloud.
• Experience establishing unit economics for large digital products or technology platforms.
• TBM or technology portfolio management experience in a sizable enterprise technology organization.

How We Weight This:

FinOps depth, financial discipline, and the ability to influence spend owners matter more in this role than deep engineering expertise. We are looking for someone who can understand the technology well enough to identify and challenge cost drivers, but whose primary strength is turning consumption, contracts, demand, and financial data into disciplined run-rate management and actionable decisions.

Success looks like a technology run-rate that is transparent and predictable; Budget Owners who understand and actively manage their spend; Contract Owners who enter renewals with clear utilization and demand data; forecasts that hold; optimization actions that convert into realized financial results; well-utilized cloud and commercial commitments; controlled AI consumption; improved SaaS utilization; and fewer technology spending surprises.

Put simply, the mission is to create transparency, accountability, and financial intelligence around HMH's Cloud, AI, SaaS, and broader technology run-rate so that Technology and business leaders can make better investment, sourcing, consumption, and operational decisions and get more value from every technology dollar.

The Information Technology organization is transforming to realize our mission: Become a leader in HMH’s digital transformation, and as a strategic partner, innovate and deliver highest value, competitive advantage solutions across all corporate and business functions. Our ambition is to be a digital leader through innovation and develop and deliver leading edge technology such as robotic process automation and artificial intelligence to solve some of HMH’s greatest operational business challenges. Our professionals will have business relevant skills to connect our HMH partners to technologies that propel the businesses to deliver the greatest value for HMH and our customers.

We are building a team of IT professionals with an insatiable appetite to learn, a relentless focus on customer service, a technological curiosity toward future possibilities, and a creativity in solving business challenges with leading technologies. Our team will find ways to work together, create a sense of community where it’s safe to take risks and learn together, develop our careers, and all have an opportunity to work on new technologies. We will work together, learn together and have fun together. As a team, we will lead HMH’s digital transformation.