Data Analyst 3

Seeking a Data Analyst 3 for a hybrid long-term contract role with the Commonwealth of Virginia in Mechanicsville, VA.

This role is pivotal in analyzing, modeling, and forecasting financial data related to Azure cloud services and on-premises data center workloads. The ideal candidate combines financial acumen with strong data analytics skills to support strategic decision-making and cost optimization initiatives.

Key Responsibilities:

• Analyze and interpret IT financial data across Azure and VITA environments, including consumption, billing, and chargeback models.
• Develop and maintain Power BI dashboards and reports to visualize cost trends, server migration impacts, and workload optimization opportunities.
• Perform variance analysis on monthly and annual IT spend, identifying anomalies and opportunities for savings.
• Manually maintain and enhance datasets from Apptio, Azure Portal, and SharePoint sources to ensure accuracy and completeness.
• Document processes and procedures for financial reporting and analysis
• Collaborate with the technical cloud team, I&O team and finance stakeholders to align cost models with operational realities.
• Support Azure migration planning by modeling server cost scenarios and forecasting reserve capacity needs.
• Contribute to FinOps strategy development by providing insights on cost drivers and utilization patterns.

Required Skills & Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Finance, Data Analytics, Information Systems, or related field.
• Advanced level of proficiency in Power BI, including Power Query and DAX, Excel (advanced), and data visualization best practices.
• Some data modeling and data manipulation skills to maintain data sets from multiple, heterogenous sources
• High familiarity with Azure cost management, Apptio, and cloud billing structures.
• Understanding of server migration strategies and workload cost modeling.
• Ability to translate technical data into insights for technical teams and managers

Preferred Qualifications:

• FinOps certification or training.
• Experience with Azure Reserved Instances and Just-In-Time (JIT) capacity planning.
• Knowledge of enterprise architecture and strategic IT planning frameworks.