Sr. Program Manager, R&D Operations
CockroachLabs
Bangalore, IndiaPosted 2 months ago
Skill Required
EngineeringMachine Learningrelated fieldKubernetesbuildingdesignCloudUnityAWSGCPandGoAI
Key highlights
- 8+ years of program management or cloud financial management experience.
- Hands‑on experience with a dedicated FinOps platform (CloudZero, Vantage, or Finout) required.
- Based in Bengaluru, India.
- Hybrid work model with office presence on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.
- Comprehensive benefits including Medical Insurance, Flexible Time Off, and Paid Parental Leave.
- FinOps Certified Practitioner (FOCP) or higher strongly preferred.
Role overview
We are seeking a Senior Technical Program Manager, FinOps to join our Research & Development Operations team in Bengaluru, India. This high‑visibility role will define and mature Cockroach Labs' FinOps capabilities, driving cost transparency, surfacing savings opportunities, and ensuring disciplined cloud infrastructure spend across engineering, finance, and operations.
Responsibilities
- Own and evolve the FinOps tooling platform used to track, report on, and analyze cloud infrastructure costs across AWS, GCP, and other providers, ensuring the data is accurate, timely, and actionable.
- Establish and run the FinOps operating cadence, including regular cost reviews, budget‑vs‑actuals variance analysis, anomaly detection, and a living optimization backlog with owners, timelines, and dollar‑value targets.
- Build and maintain cost allocation frameworks that attribute cloud spend to products, teams, and customer workloads to support COGS calculation, unit economics, and margin analysis in partnership with Finance.
- Identify and prioritize cloud cost optimization opportunities, including rightsizing, committed use discounts (reserved instances/savings plans), idle resource cleanup, storage tiering, egress reduction, Kubernetes/container cost efficiency, and emerging AI and machine learning infrastructure costs such as GPU compute, model training pipelines, and inference workloads.
- Manage cloud budgets and forecasts in close partnership with Finance and Engineering leadership; explain variances, surface risks early, and drive corrective action before spend exceeds plan.
- Drive cost accountability across Engineering by establishing tagging and labeling standards, showback/chargeback models, and cost‑aware development practices that embed FinOps into the engineering culture.
- Build executive‑level dashboards and reporting to communicate cloud spend trends, savings realized, optimization pipeline, and forecast vs. actuals to senior leadership and the board.
- Partner cross‑functionally with Engineering, Infrastructure, Procurement, and Finance to align cost reduction initiatives with platform roadmap priorities and business goals, without compromising service quality or engineering velocity.
- Define governance frameworks, best practices, and FinOps policies that can scale with the business, including vendor discount strategy, commitment management, and cloud budget governance.
- Conduct a thorough review of Cockroach Labs' cloud infrastructure footprint, existing FinOps tooling, and current state of cost attribution and tagging within the first 30 days.
- Meet with key stakeholders across R&D and Finance to understand current cloud spend tracking, gaps, and decision‑making needs.
- Kick off design of a tagging hierarchy to allow cloud infrastructure costs to be viewed and rolled up by team, product, environment, and customer workload.
- Finalize tagging taxonomy with Finance sign‑off and drive adoption and enforcement across Engineering by day 60.
- Lead internal training on the FinOps tooling platform, handle configuration changes, and serve as the go‑to resource for budget owners and team leads.
- Build and publish the first cost optimization backlog, identifying highest‑value efficiency opportunities and begin executing on actionable items.
- Partner with Finance and budget owners to put budgets in place by category, deliver the first quarterly cloud spend report to leadership, and help teams build dashboards and showback views.
- Explain anomalies or trends to engineers, finance partners, or executives with clarity and confidence.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in program management, cloud financial management, or a closely related field, with a proven track record of leading complex, cross‑functional initiatives independently.
- Hands‑on FinOps tooling experience: production‑grade experience with a dedicated FinOps platform (specifically CloudZero, Vantage, or Finout) is required, in addition to proficiency with native CSP cost management tools (AWS Cost Explorer / Cost & Usage Reports, GCP Billing, Azure Cost Management).
- Strong financial acumen: practical experience with budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis, and cost allocation methodologies including showback, chargeback, and COGS/margin attribution.
- Deep understanding of cloud pricing models: committed use discounts, reserved instances, savings plans, spot/preemptible pricing, data egress costs, storage tiers, and managed service pricing across major cloud providers.
- Cost allocation and unit economics fluency: demonstrated ability to build or mature cost allocation frameworks that attribute shared infrastructure spend to products or customers in support of gross margin analysis.
- Data analysis skills: comfortable working with large, complex billing datasets and translating raw cost data into actionable insights; experience building BI dashboards in Looker, Tableau, Quicksight, or similar tools.
- Cross‑functional influence: a track record of driving cost governance and cultural change across engineering and finance teams without direct authority, aligning engineers, finance partners, and senior leaders around shared cost accountability.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills: ability to present complex cost data clearly to both technical (infrastructure engineers, SREs) and non‑technical (CFO, board) audiences.
- A demonstrated practice of integrating AI tools into your daily workflow to improve speed, quality, and decision‑making.
- Fluency with AI across core tasks — research, drafting, analysis, planning — used as a default, not an exception.
Nice to have
- FinOps Certified Practitioner (FOCP) or higher (e.g., FinOps Certified Professional) strongly preferred; cloud platform certifications (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with the FinOps for AI framework are a plus.
- Experience building or maturing a FinOps practice is a significant differentiator.
- Comfort operating in ambiguity, excitement to define great FinOps at Cockroach Labs, and forward‑thinking to extend cost governance into emerging areas like AI and machine learning infrastructure.
Benefits
- Medical Insurance
- Flexible Time Off
- Paid Parental Leave
- Mental Wellbeing Benefits
- Internet Reimbursement
- Wellness Allowance
- Food Allowance
- Office Commute Reimbursement
- And more!
Additional details
- Category‑defining tech. Career‑defining work.
- Cockroach Labs operates a significant cloud infrastructure footprint to power CockroachDB Cloud and internal engineering environments.
- Location: Bengaluru, India.
- Reports to Colin Minihan, Director of R&D Operations, within the R&D Operations organization.
- Cockroach Labs is an Equal Opportunity Employer building a diverse and inclusive workforce; accommodations can be requested via accessibility@cockroachlabs.com.
- Hybrid work model: local Roachers come into the office on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays and work flexibly the rest of the week.
- The R&D Operations team enables the organization to exceed customer expectations by shortening feedback loops and accelerating learning.