FinOps • Platform • Reliability

Practical leadership for cloud cost clarity, delivery systems, and resilient engineering.

I lead FinOps at Anglepoint, advise Quantum SparQ on AI/ML and quantum direction, and take on select fractional DevOps work through nelfordconsulting.

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20 years Engineering leadership across DevOps, SRE, cloud, and FinOps.
FOCUS Contributor to the open standard and active FinOps for AI candidate.
Instructor FinOps teaching at BYU and NYIT with practitioner-oriented focus.
Positioning

Engineering effectiveness is the through-line.

My work sits where cost clarity, technical execution, and operating discipline meet. The goal is not theory. The goal is systems that teams can actually run.

  • FinOps and FOCUS implementation that makes cloud cost data usable
  • Platform and DevOps systems that improve delivery predictability
  • Reliability trade-offs grounded in business impact and operational reality
Current Roles

Built across multiple operating contexts.

Anglepoint

Head of FinOps

Building a FinOps practice inside a SAM/ITAM consulting firm.

nelfordconsulting

Fractional DevOps

Targeted platform and delivery leadership for select engagements.

Quantum SparQ

Board Advisor

AI/ML and quantum direction for an early-stage startup as the 3rd employee.

FOCUS

Open Standard Contributor

Hands-on participation in the specification and its practical adoption path.

Professional Proof

Teaching, credentials, and public credibility.

Professional signal should be concrete. Teaching, certifications, and standards work show where the operating model holds up in public.

  • June 8-11, 2026: selected to speak at FinOps X in San Diego on building a semantic layer for FOCUS.
  • November 2025: Co-taught the FinOps Practitioner course at New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) with Chairman Ron Brill.
  • January 2025: Taught the FinOps Practitioner course at Brigham Young University (BYU).
  • Certifications: FinOps Certified Instructor, Professional, Practitioner, and FOCUS Analyst.
  • November 19, 2025 NYIT recap post
Selected Outcomes

Operational improvements that changed cost, speed, or visibility.

Bill.com

GitLab licensing and consolidation

Built scripts to identify active and duplicate GitLab users across Bill.com, Divvy, and Invoice2Go estates, then supported migration of users, settings, and source code to the primary instance.

Paired the technical migration with vendor negotiation to avoid double and triple counting licenses during renewal while consolidating on the company timeline.

Bill.com

Weekly cloud cost operating model

Created weekly AWS cost reporting across Bill.com, Divvy, and Invoice2Go accounts, tracking spend by group, commitment coverage and utilization, week-over-week change, and glidepath to target spend.

The reporting became the weekly operating mechanism for catching commitment expiry, spend spikes, and drift from cost goals.

Bill.com

Datadog spend visibility and reduction

Researched Datadog billing models in depth, identified major overspend areas across RUM, Synthetics, and infrastructure hosts, and implemented specific reduction levers.

Changes included RUM sampling adjustments, Synthetics cleanup, and reducing non-production host monitoring to bring observability cost under tighter control.

NICE inContact

DevOps Self Service Portal

Invented the internal self-service portal concept, designed the initial workflows and UX, and drove delivery of on-demand automation for environments, branch creation, tech radar visibility, and other recurring requests.

The result was faster turnaround, lower error rates, built-in telemetry, and viral internal adoption as more teams used the portal and requested new services.

Bill.com

SARBot support analytics hackathon

In 2022, we extended the SARBot Slack-to-JIRA workflow so requesters categorized the type of DevOps help they needed as tickets were opened.

That made it possible to track support demand by category alongside cycle time, wait time, and total lead time, giving the team a clearer operating view of where help effort was going.

Speaking & Teaching

Public teaching, internal technical education, and practitioner forums.

I teach and present where operating detail matters: internal conferences, FinOps events, webinars, and cross-functional technical forums.

  • June 8-11, 2026: selected speaker at FinOps X in San Diego on building a semantic layer for FOCUS.
  • January 22, 2026: presented in the ITAM Forum online FinOps summit.
  • November 14, 2025: invited panelist for an AI strategy roundtable in Salt Lake City.
  • November 6, 2025: taught LISA training at ITAM Forum Wisdom Unplugged in Newbury, UK with Chris Hayes and Ron Brill.
  • June 3, 2025: invited by Larry Advey to help lead the FinOps X chalk talk on enabling and adopting FOCUS.
  • October 9, 2024: presented in the Sedai forum on Kubernetes development environments and Bill.com's team spaces approach.
  • April 24, 2024: spoke at the ISC2 Salt Lake City meetup on security and DevOps collaboration.
  • 2021: spoke at NICE inContact internal tech conferences on Jenkins coded pipelines and graph theory with Neo4j.
  • 2021: led the NICE inContact cloud graph-mapping hackathon project that won its category.
  • November 6, 2025 LISA training event page
Selected Work

Writing, tools, code, and the current operating surface.

🤖

FOCUS Practitioner's GPT

A free proof of concept built from public FOCUS materials to reduce onboarding friction.

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🧮

FOCUS Knowledge Base

A public semantic knowledge system for learning, navigating, and applying the FOCUS specification.

View knowledge base
📝

Writing & Speaking

Articles, talks, teaching, and public technical communication.

Browse highlights
📊

Cost of Resilience Calculator

Model uptime targets, downtime cost, and spend trade-offs.

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💻

GitHub

Personal engineering work plus FOCUS ecosystem contributions across two profiles.

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💡

Now

Current technical focus areas and active initiatives.

View current focus
Consulting

Senior infrastructure and DevOps help without a full-time hire.

For small software teams that need to ship faster, reduce operational drag, or build better delivery systems, I take on targeted fractional work through nelfordconsulting. Use the Resume page for a public-safe profile, then reach out on LinkedIn.