AI & Data FinOps Lead

Empowering Africa’s tomorrow, together…one story at a time.

With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

Job Summary

The AI & Data FinOps Lead is responsible for establishing, leading and scaling a new AI FinOps capability within Absa's Chief Data & Applied AI Office (CDAIO), with a mandate that extends across Absa Technology.

The role is accountable for delivering and maintaining through continuous iterations end-to-end transparency, control and optimisation of AI and data-related consumption across the organisation. This includes the AI Gateway, AWS AI services, Microsoft Copilot, GitHub Copilot and direct use case licensing. Over time, the capability will expand to cover all data-related costs across the CDAIO under a broader Data FinOps remit.

The purpose of the role is to ensure that AI and data consumption is fully transparent, attributable and charged back to consuming business units on a monthly variable basis — with transfer pricing retained only for genuinely centralised shared services. The successful incumbent will bridge deep technical execution with strong commercial acumen and will serve as the primary interface between CDAIO and the existing Cloud FinOps team.

AI FinOps Capability Build & Observability (30%)

• Design, build and operationalise foundational dashboarding with insights within the first six months, covering the AI Gateway, AWS AI services, Microsoft Copilot and GitHub Copilot.
• Develop and maintain API integrations across all AI consumption sources to provide real-time visibility of token usage, licence allocation and AWS infrastructure charges.
• Continuously enhance tooling, dashboards and data pipelines as new use cases, vendors and consumption models are onboarded.
• Lead the expansion of the capability into Data FinOps, covering all data platform, storage, compute and pipeline costs across the CDAIO.

Chargeback, Showback & Cost Allocation (20%)

• Design and implement dynamic chargeback and auditable show-back models that allocate AI and data costs to consuming business units on a monthly variable basis.
• Build workflow automation across systems and business areas to enable accurate, auditable and timely cost attribution.
• Reduce reliance on Annual management account Transfer pricing and retaining it only for genuinely centralised shared services where consumption-based allocation is not feasible.
• Leverage and rationalise existing enterprise tooling such as Magic Orange /Harness to industrialise chargeback processes where appropriate.

Forecasting, Budgeting & Cost Controls (15%)

• Build and maintain accurate monthly data that can be used as part of forecasting process for multiple stakeholders across Absa Technology and business units.
• Implement automated alerting and shut-off mechanisms triggered by defined consumption and budget thresholds wherever possible.
• Partner with Finance to align AI and Data FinOps forecasts to budget cycles, variance reporting and outlook submissions.

Value Tracking & Use Case Economics (15%)

• Establish a robust framework to track financial impact provide insights into the value realisation outputs linked to each AI use case into our CDAIO Strategy capability.
• Provide clear unit economics — including cost per token, cost per user, cost per inference and cost per use case — together with ROI insights for CDAIO leadership and business sponsors to enable go/no-go decisions and identify where optimisation opportunities exist.
• Identify and surface optimisation opportunities, driving cost-out initiatives across AI and data consumption.

Stakeholder Engagement & Governance (10%)

• Serve as the primary interface between CDAIO and the existing Cloud FinOps team, ensuring alignment of methodology, tooling and reporting.
• Engage credibly with VP, Principal and executive stakeholders across Technology, Finance and the business units.
• Partner with CDAIO technical teams — including engineering, platform and data science — to embed FinOps practices into delivery lifecycles.
• Contribute to relevant governance forums, steering committees and executive reporting cycles.

Capability & Team Development (10%)

• Develop a clear roadmap to scale the AI & Data FinOps function, including future team structure and operating model.
• Mentor and uplift FinOps literacy across CDAIO and Absa Technology through on the job training and through the enablement of tooling that creates understanding of how the costs work.
• Stay current on emerging FinOps practices, AI cost management innovations and relevant industry benchmarks.

Experience & Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications (Essential)

• Matric (Grade 12).
• A relevant Diploma or higher qualification in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Data or a related technical discipline.
• A non-technology academic and career background is an automatic exclusion for this role.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Honours degree in a technology, engineering or data-related discipline.
• FinOps Certified Practitioner or FinOps Certified Professional certification.
• AWS Certifications (e.g., Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect, AWS FinOps or equivalent).
• Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud certifications considered an advantage.

Experience Required

• 7–10 years of combined technical and business experience.
• Demonstrable hands-on coding and development background, with Python skills considered essential.
• Proven experience building observability, dashboards and data products using Power BI, Tableau and/or Databricks or other industry accepted leaders in these categories.
• Strong working experience with AWS Cost Explorer, AWS billing APIs and broader cloud cost management tooling.
• Strong API integration experience (REST APIs, JSON, authentication patterns).
• Experience working closely with Finance, Commercial or Reporting functions; and experience in optimising functions with outputs required earlier in this document.
• Working knowledge of chargeback and showback models and tooling, with Magic Orange and Harness experience considered an advantage.
• Banking or financial services experience is not essential; however, exposure to regulated, complex enterprise environments is preferred.

Education

Bachelor's Degree: Information Technology

Absa Bank Limited is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. In compliance with the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups whose appointments will contribute towards achievement of equitable demographic representation of our workforce profile and add to the diversity of the Bank.

Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertised