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Plaid is seeking a FinOps Program Manager to lead financial accountability, visibility, and optimization across all engineering-related spend. The role sits at the intersection of Engineering, Product, and Finance, ensuring spending decisions are transparent, intentional, and aligned with product strategy and business priorities.
Key responsibilities include monitoring and analyzing engineering spend across cloud infrastructure, AI/ML workloads, data platforms, and third-party SaaS tools; identifying trends, anomalies, and optimization opportunities. You will build and maintain forecasts for engineering spend in partnership with Finance and engineering leaders, incorporating cost considerations into product roadmaps and architectural decisions.
You will lead cost optimization initiatives such as rightsizing, commitment strategies, and workload efficiency improvements in collaboration with engineering owners. The role requires creating and maintaining dashboards and reporting that make spend understandable and actionable for both engineers and executives, while implementing FinOps practices including showback/chargeback models and cost ownership frameworks.
You will partner on tooling and automation with data and engineering teams to improve cost visibility and forecasting accuracy, and drive alignment and behavior change by helping teams balance cost, performance, reliability, and velocity through data-driven decision making.
Required qualifications include 6–10+ years of experience at the intersection of engineering, infrastructure, data, or finance in cloud-native or SaaS environments. You must have proven experience partnering with engineering teams on cloud infrastructure, data platforms, AI/ML workloads, and SaaS spend decisions, with specific expertise managing AI and machine learning spend including usage tracking, budget forecasting, and cost optimization.
You need a working understanding of modern cloud-native architectures, strong foundation in cost analysis and forecasting, comfort working directly with data and SQL, and demonstrated success building high-quality dashboards and driving adoption of cost awareness practices. Strong communication skills and ability to tailor complex concepts for diverse audiences are essential.
