AI FinOps & Tokenomics Lead

Position: Staff AI FinOps & Tokenomics Lead
Job  Type:
Regular Work Style: hybrid

Location:

Seattle,WA,United States Travel:
Up to 25%
Role:
Staff AI Fin Ops & Tokenomics Lead Department:
Software & Product Development Business Unit:
Software & Product Development About UKG:

At UKG, the work you do matters. The code you ship, the decisions you make, and the care you show a customer all add up to real impact. Today, tens of millions of workers start and end their days with our workforce operating platform helping people get paid, grow in their careers, and shape the future of their industries.

We never stop learning. We challenge the norm, push for better, and celebrate the wins along the way. Here, you'll get flexibility that's real, benefits you can count on, and a team that succeeds together. Because at UKG, your work matters and so do you.

About the Role:

UKG is scaling AI across its products, platforms, and internal workflows. That growth creates a new class of financial and operational questions: how much does an AI capability cost to serve, what drives that cost, how does it change with adoption, and what value does it create for customers and UKG? The Staff AI Fin Ops & Tokenomics Lead will establish the discipline, data, and operating model to answer those questions and turn the answers into better decisions.

This is a senior individual contributor role at the intersection of Cloud Fin Ops, AI infrastructure economics, product strategy, engineering, finance, and procurement. You will own the AI Fin Ops agenda across UKG's AI portfolio, including foundation-model consumption, inference, agents, embeddings, vector and retrieval services, GPUs, data platforms, and supporting cloud infrastructure. You will influence architecture and product decisions from planning through production, ensuring AI innovation can scale with transparent economics and durable controls.

The role is expected to operate as a trusted advisor to senior engineering and product leaders. Success will require more than reporting spend: you will create repeatable mechanisms that help teams choose the right model and architecture, forecast demand, manage commitments and capacity, protect margins, and demonstrate measurable business value.

What You Will Own:

The AI Fin Ops roadmap, and operating rhythm across UKG Engineering, Product, Finance, Procurement, Cloud Operations, and AI platform teams.

A trusted view of AI consumption, cost drivers, unit economics, forecasts, commitments, and value realization across cloud providers and AI vendors.

The standards, tooling, and decision frameworks that make AI cost and performance visible before architecture and product decisions are locked in.

Executive-level recommendations on AI investment, risk, optimization, capacity, pricing, and margin implications.

Key Responsibilities:

AI Fin Ops Operating Model:

Lead UKG's AI Fin Ops operating model, including ownership, decision support , governance forums, intake, escalation paths, and recurring business reviews.

Create a repeatable lifecycle for AI economics: business case, architecture review, forecast, launch readiness, production monitoring, optimization, and post-launch value review.

Establish common definitions and measurement standards for AI spend, usage, utilization, cost efficiency, quality, latency, and business value.

Build executive narratives that connect AI consumption and operating performance to product adoption, customer outcomes, revenue, gross margin, and investment decisions.

AI Cost Management, Tokenomics and Optimization:

Build and maintain cost models for LLMs, inference, agents, embeddings, vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation, GPUs, data movement, storage, observability, and shared platform services.

Define tokenomics and cost attribution models that…