Cloud Economics Lead [FinOps]

To achieve our mission, we need to constantly optimise our operations and technology in order to pass on savings to our customers. We're looking for an experienced Engineering Lead to own our FinOps domain, driving cloud cost efficiency and accountability across our engineering organisation.

As an Engineering Lead for FinOps, you’ll partner with a product manager and FinOps analyst to build a small cross-functional team playing a critical role in managing our multi-million dollar cloud spend. You will be responsible for:

• Fostering a Cost-Conscious Culture: Spearhead organisational change management to embed cost-aware practices ("Shift-Left" ideology) across engineering teams, ensuring solutions are built with cost-awareness and efficiency.

• Driving Cost Efficiency & Accountability: Develop and implement frameworks, systems, and tools to create a culture of ownership and accountability for infrastructure costs.

• Strategic Collaboration: Partner closely with Finance, Product, and Engineering leadership to define and meet ambitious financial targets, ensuring Wise's scalable and efficient growth. You will facilitate the tracking and attribution of cloud costs to respective product owners and provide insights to support decision-making.

• Technical Leadership & Innovation: Lead technical initiatives with measurable impact that reduce waste and drive efficiency across our estate.

• Team & Talent Development: Lead with empathy, fostering a high-performance, ownership-driven, and inclusive culture both inside the team and beyond. You will provide leadership and growth opportunities to team members, mentor engineers, and contribute to recruiting efforts within the FinOps domain.

• Design and deliver the FinOps roadmap: In partnership with the product manager define and implement a strategic FinOps vision, strategy and roadmap aligned with Wise's long-term objectives, ensuring optimal cloud spend efficiency. 

For general expectations of Engineering Leads at Wise, please refer to our Engineering Levels: Scope & Expectations document.

How we work

We work differently and we’re proud of it. Our teams are empowered to solve the most urgent and relevant problems they see for our customers. We all share the responsibility of making Wise a success. We empower Wisers to make decisions and take ownership of how they work best. Teams and individuals have different needs – that’s why we have company-wide principles , and then our teams set their own guidelines.

What will you be working on

• Cost Ownership and Visibility:

  • Implement and manage the total cost of ownership model using our cost visibility tooling (CloudZero, Snowflake, Superset)

  • Facilitate the tracking and attribution of cloud costs to respective teams/squads/tribes.

• Unit Economics and KPI Management:

  • Drive a tenacious focus on unit economics to ensure each element of our product is ‘cloud cost aware’ and sustainable.

  • Deliver granular KPI programs that track and manage unit economics and push cost back into our product-economics function.

• Financial Forecasting and Reporting:

  • Build a set of robust and reliable KPI dashboards (In partnership with a dedicated analyst) that reflect our current and future spend trajectory

  • Enhance/automate our financial reporting processes to reduce manual efforts and improve accuracy.

  • Collaboration with the tribe product lead to create an accurate long term forecast.

• Cloud Architecture Efficiency:

  • Establish policies, controls, and governance mechanisms to ensure that cloud use aligns with business objectives, complies with regulatory requirements, and optimizes cloud resources efficiently.

  • Partner within the engineering organization to ensure solutions are built with cost-awareness and efficiency to maximize business value while achieving performance, scalability, and operational objectives.

Qualifications

We are fully aware that it is uncommon for a candidate to have all skills required and we fully support everyone in learning new skills with us. So if you have some of those listed below and are eager to learn more we do want to hear from you!

• Proven experience in FinOps, Cloud Financial Management (CFM), or cloud cost optimization, preferably in a large enterprise/product.

• Strong leadership skills with the ability to influence senior engineers and drive cultural change across a large engineering population..

• Deep understanding of major public cloud platforms. Primarily AWS and its core offerings - EC2, EBS, RDS, VPC, S3 etc.

• Strong analytical or data science skills, with experience in data analysis and visualisation tools to create accurate reporting and generate actionable cost insights.

• Excellent collaboration skills, you’ll need to be able to partner with product and platform engineers to execute optimisations.

• Strategic thinker with a track record of developing and executing cost optimization programs with demonstrable results.

• Proficiency in analyzing Effective communication skills to engage cross-functional teams and senior leadership.

Nice to have:

• Proficiency in automation and scripting languages (e.g., Python).

• Experience as a cloud/platform engineer in a domain such as SRE.

Additional Information

At Wise, you’ll have the opportunity to work in a fast-paced environment where you can make a real impact. We offer competitive benefits, a collaborative culture, and the chance to be part of a mission-driven company that’s changing the way money moves around the world.

Starting salary: £xxx

Interested? Find out more:

For everyone, everywhere. We're people building money without borders — without judgement or prejudice, too. We believe teams are strongest when they are diverse, equitable and inclusive.

We're proud to have a truly international team, and we celebrate our differences.
Inclusive teams help us live our values and make sure every Wiser feels respected, empowered to contribute towards our mission and able to progress in their careers.

If you want to find out more about what it's like to work at Wise visit Wise.Jobs .

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