Staff Engineer, FinOps

About the role

The Staff FinOps Engineer will own the technical backbone that powers Amplitude's cost visibility across major vendors (cloud hosting, observability, AI/ML, and core SaaS), and partner directly with Engineering, Finance, and Product to turn that visibility into real savings and better decisions.

Responsibilities

• Own our cost & vendor data platform — design, build, and maintain the pipelines, models, and storage that consolidate cost and usage data across AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, observability tooling, AI providers, and other strategic vendors into a single, trusted source of truth
• Turn data into decisions and savings — partner with Engineering, Infrastructure, Product, and Finance to translate raw cost and usage signals into clear insights, recommendations, and playbooks that influence roadmaps and architecture
• Personally implement cost optimizations — dive into services, workloads, and vendor configurations to execute optimizations yourself when needed (e.g., rightsizing, storage tiering, query optimization, metrics/logs reduction, plan changes), not just make recommendations
• Build self-service FinOps tooling — develop dashboards, scorecards, alerts, bots, and internal tools that make it easy for service owners to understand their spend, identify waste, and track progress against optimization goals
• Establish guardrails and best practices — define and codify standards for cost-efficient architecture (e.g., instance families, storage patterns, data retention, observability practices, AI usage patterns) and embed them into infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and review processes
• Partner closely with Finance on forecasting — collaborate with FP&A and vendor owners to forecast short- and long-term spend, model the impact of new features and infrastructure changes, and reconcile actuals against forecasts
• Lead cross-functional cost programs — drive multi-quarter initiatives (e.g., Datadog/observability optimization, storage lifecycle redesign, AI vendor consolidation) from problem definition through design, execution, and ongoing measurement
• Raise the FinOps bar across Amplitude — run reviews, office hours, and targeted trainings to help teams interpret cost data, reason about trade-offs, and incorporate cost as a first-class engineering and product constraint
• Instrument and measure everything — define KPIs and build telemetry around cost programs (e.g., $ saved, unit economics, ROI, impact on performance/reliability) to ensure we're shipping changes that actually move the business
• Act as a subject-matter expert — stay current on cloud pricing changes, vendor offerings, and FinOps best practices, and bring pragmatic, opinionated guidance back into our architecture, contracts, and tooling

Requirements

• 7+ years of hands-on experience in FinOps, SRE, Platform, or Infrastructure engineering, with a track record of reducing spend and improving unit economics in a modern cloud environment (AWS preferred)
• Comfortable in code and spreadsheets — writing production-quality code (Python, TypeScript, or similar), building data pipelines and dashboards, and fluency with financial concepts (budgets, forecasts, ROI, unit economics) to partner credibly with Finance
• Experience with cost & usage data (e.g., AWS CUR, SaaS vendor exports, observability billing data) and modeling it into schemas and metrics that make sense to engineers, leadership, and Finance
• Shipped real optimizations yourself — examples of changing infrastructure, configurations, or code to reduce spend
• High ownership and autonomy — owning ambiguous, cross-functional problems end-to-end, from framing and alignment through technical design, implementation, rollout, and ongoing iteration
• Balance program management with engineering depth — driving a roadmap, aligning stakeholders, and tracking outcomes, while also diving into details like Terraform modules, Kubernetes manifests, or Datadog/SaaS billing settings
• Clear communication with diverse audiences — explaining complex technical and financial trade-offs to engineers, PMs, Finance partners, and executives in a concise, data-driven, and actionable manner
• Data and analytics instincts — comfortable working with SQL and analytics tools, and defaulting to instrumenting work and validating that changes improved cost, performance, or reliability
• Care about reliability and developer experience — optimizing cost without sacrificing performance, availability, or developer velocity, and thoughtful about introducing friction vs. automating
• Curiosity and fast-learning — enjoying picking up new domains and applying knowledge quickly to make better decisions