[Remote] Staff Engineer, FinOps

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Amplitude is the leading AI analytics platform, helping over 4,700 customers build better products and digital experiences. As a Staff FinOps Engineer, you will own the technical backbone for cost visibility across major vendors and partner closely with Engineering, Finance, and Product to drive 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

Skills

  • 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 as in spreadsheets — can write production-quality code (Python, TypeScript, or similar), build data pipelines and dashboards, and fluent enough with financial concepts (budgets, forecasts, ROI, unit economics) to partner credibly with Finance
  • Experience building cost data systems — worked with cost & usage data (e.g., AWS CUR, SaaS vendor exports, observability billing data) and can model it into schemas and metrics that make sense to engineers, leadership, and Finance
  • Shipped real optimizations yourself — can point to concrete examples where personally changed infrastructure, configurations, or code to reduce spend (not just recommended changes for others to implement)
  • Operate with high ownership and autonomy — like 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 — comfortable driving a roadmap, aligning stakeholders, and tracking outcomes, while also diving into details like Terraform modules, Kubernetes manifests, or Datadog/SaaS billing settings
  • Communicate clearly with diverse audiences — can explain complex technical and financial trade-offs to engineers, PMs, Finance partners, and executives in a way that is concise, data-driven, and actionable
  • Strong data and analytics instincts — comfortable working with SQL and analytics tools, and default to instrumenting work and validating that changes improved cost, performance, or reliability
  • Care about reliability and developer experience — optimize cost without sacrificing performance, availability, or developer velocity, and thoughtful about where to introduce friction vs. where to automate
  • Curious and fast-learning — enjoy picking up new domains (e.g., AI infra, new observability vendors, pricing models) and applying that knowledge quickly to make better decisions

Company Overview

  • Amplitude is a product intelligence platform that provides digital product tools that help teams run and grow their businesses. It was founded in 2012, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA, with a workforce of 501-1000 employees. Its website is http://amplitude.com.

    • Company H1B Sponsorship

  • Amplitude has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 1 in 2026, 28 in 2025, 22 in 2024, 19 in 2023, 16 in 2022, 23 in 2021, 10 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.

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