FinOps Program Manager
Plaid offers a platform that enables applications to connect with users' bank accounts, facilitating a wide range of financial services. They provide tools for payments, personal finance management, credit, and more, serving clients like Moneybox, Western Union, and Affirm. Their core product is an API that provides access to a vast network of financial institutions, allowing developers to build financial products and services.
Funding
Projects
About Plaid
Plaid is a financial technology company that enables applications to connect with users' bank accounts. It allows consumers and businesses to interact with their bank accounts, check balances, and make payments through other financial technology applications. Plaid's network connects to over 12,000 financial institutions across 20 markets, serving a global user base of over 100 million. The company provides APIs for developers to build solutions for personal financial management, credit, payments, business finances, iGaming, and property management. Key products include Auth for account verification, Link for connecting accounts, Transactions for accessing financial data, Balance for real-time checks, Assets for verifying assets, and Identity for user verification. Plaid focuses on increasing conversion, fighting fraud, and providing clean, organized financial data for smarter underwriting and other financial services.
Skills
About the Role
You'll take ownership of financial accountability and visibility across all engineering-related spend, including cloud infrastructure, AI/ML and data workloads, and third-party SaaS tools. You will partner closely with Engineering, Product, and Finance to ensure spending decisions are transparent, intentional, and aligned with business priorities. Rather than acting as a cost-control gatekeeper, you'll enable teams to understand, own, and optimize their own spend while keeping engineering velocity high. You'll build forecasts, lead cost optimization initiatives like rightsizing and commitment strategies, and create dashboards and reporting that make spend understandable for engineers and executives alike. You'll also implement FinOps practices such as showback/chargeback models and unit economics, and help drive the cultural shift toward cost-aware engineering decision making.
Requirements
- 6–10+ years of relevant experience at the intersection of engineering, infrastructure, data, or finance in a cloud-native or SaaS environment
- Proven experience partnering with engineering teams to influence decisions involving cloud infrastructure, data platforms, AI/ML workloads, or SaaS spend
- Working understanding of modern cloud-native architectures including compute, storage, networking, data pipelines, and managed services
- Strong foundation in cost analysis, forecasting, budgeting, and variance management
- Comfort working directly with data, including writing SQL or using AI-assisted tools to explore datasets and validate assumptions
- Experience building clear, high-quality dashboards and BI artifacts
- Demonstrated success driving adoption and behavior change around cost awareness
- Experience owning and delivering cross-functional programs end-to-end without direct authority
- Familiarity with FinOps principles and practices such as shared ownership, showback/chargeback, and unit economics
- Strong communication skills to tailor complex technical and financial concepts for different audiences
Responsibilities
- Monitor and analyze engineering spend across cloud, AI/ML, data platforms, and SaaS
- Identify trends, anomalies, and optimization opportunities
- Build and maintain forecasts for engineering spend
- Partner with Finance and engineering leaders to understand drivers, assumptions, and risks
- Partner with engineering, product, and TPMs to incorporate cost considerations into roadmaps and architectural decisions
- Lead cost optimization initiatives such as rightsizing, commitment strategies, and workload efficiency improvements
- Create and maintain dashboards and reporting for spend visibility
- Implement FinOps practices including showback/chargeback models, unit economics, and cost ownership frameworks
- Partner on tooling and automation to improve cost visibility, forecasting accuracy, and operational efficiency
- Drive alignment and behavior change through data-driven decision making
Benefits
- Medical, dental, vision, and 401(k)
- Equity