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Salary: USD 110,000 - 174,000 / annual
Cloudflare is seeking a Product Cost Analyst to join the R&D Finance team. This hands-on individual contributor role focuses on building and maintaining product cost models that translate compute, storage, bandwidth, and AI/inference resource consumption into unit cost-to-serve metrics with transparent assumptions and documented methodologies.
Key responsibilities include:
• Build and maintain product cost models that translate technical resource usage into clear unit economics, with transparent assumptions and documented methodologies.
• Partner with Product and Engineering to evaluate new product introductions, architecture changes, and resource usage shifts; quantify cost and margin implications across connected workloads.
• Develop and validate shared-cost allocation analyses with Infrastructure Finance, distinguishing direct costs, shared costs, and unused capacity while reconciling product views to underlying financial totals.
• Support Pricing with reliable cost inputs and scenario analysis for commercial decisions and quoting workflows. Translate hardware generation changes, bandwidth rate updates, and product architecture shifts into updated assumptions.
• Connect capital investment to product economics by analyzing server costs, deployment timing, useful-life and depreciation assumptions, and utilization across edge, core, and accelerated-computing infrastructure.
• Contribute to capital and capacity planning through demand-versus-capacity scenarios, investment trade-offs, and forecast updates.
• Produce decision-ready reporting on product costs, unit economics, and margin drivers. Explain actual-versus-plan changes and separate volume, mix, rate, utilization, and allocation effects.
• Improve finance data and repeatable workflows with finance programs, data, and engineering partners. Help validate operational inputs, establish reconciliation checks, and automate recurring analyses.
• Translate analysis into recommendations that technical and non-technical partners can act on, balancing detail, financial judgment, and the needs of a growing product portfolio.
The role offers an opportunity to deepen ownership of Developer and self-serve product economics as the work evolves. You will move between financial models, operational data, and cross-functional problem-solving, using automation and AI thoughtfully to make recurring work more reliable and scalable.
REQUIREMENTS:
Must-Have:
• 5+ years of experience in FP&A, strategic finance, cost analysis, business analytics, or a related analytical field, with evidence of building financial models and translating data into business recommendations.
• Advanced Excel or Google Sheets skills, including the ability to build flexible, driver-based models and test assumptions through sensitivity and scenario analysis.
• Ability to work with large or imperfect datasets, investigate discrepancies, reconcile financial and operational views, and document assumptions and controls.
• Understanding of financial statements, cost drivers, gross margin, and unit economics, with familiarity with capital expenditures and depreciation.
• Ability to learn technical business models and connect resource usage, infrastructure capacity, and product architecture to financial outcomes.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration and clear written and verbal communication; comfortable asking questions, challenging assumptions constructively, and explaining analysis to different audiences.
• Evidence of ongoing AI skill development, including prompt and context engineering; ability to evaluate emerging tools and apply them to practical finance problems.
• Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, a related quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience.
Nice-to-Have:
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, usage-based businesses, product costing, or shared-cost allocations.
• Hands-on SQL skills and experience with business intelligence tools; Python or another analytical scripting language for repeatable analysis.
• Familiarity with infrastructure and/or data-center operations and the financial drivers of capacity expansion (hardware, power, cooling, deployment lead times); exposure to construction or build-out economics.
• Exposure to server or network capital planning, hardware lifecycle economics, utilization analysis, or fixed-asset reporting.
• Demonstrated ability to integrate AI tools into finance or analytical workflows with measurable improvements in cycle time, accuracy, or review quality.
• Experience applying responsible AI practices to financial analysis, including assessing data-privacy and decision risks, checking for bias or misleading assumptions, validating outputs against source data, and maintaining human review and an auditable record.
• Experience improving financial systems, allocation processes, data pipelines, or forecasting workflows in a matrixed organization.
• Familiarity with planning and enterprise systems such as Anaplan, Oracle, or Workday.
