• Most companies treat FinOps like a janitorial service: engineers make a mess, and the FinOps person follows them around with a broom and a spreadsheet of "unattached EBS volumes." • At our scale, we aren't interested in "saving money" in the abstract. We’re interested in efficiency as a product feature. Every dollar we shave off our unit economics is a dollar we can pass directly back to our customers, making our product more competitive and our margins healthier. • We’re shifting FinOps left! • We believe the most expensive line of code is the one written without considering how it scales. We want to move cost conversations from the billing cycle to the design doc. In this role, you aren’t a gatekeeper; you’re an enabler. You’ll be successful when: • cost is a first-class citizen: Engineers treat "cost per query" or "cost per ingest" with the same rigor they treat latency or availability. You’ll be the person engineers go to when asking, "Will this architecture be expensive?" and have the credibility to provide the right answer. • the "hot potato" dies: No more reactive scrambles when the AWS bill hits. You’ll build the systems that give teams the autonomy to own their own margins. • cultural compounding: You shouldn't be a hero who personally finds $2M in a closet. You’ll be the architect who builds a culture where 100 engineers make 1% better decisions every day. • Own the strategy and enable cost-aware engineering: You build the systems and attribution structures (tagging, showbacks) that give teams ownership of their impact. • Partner with Finance: Explain variances, maintain clean cost allocation, and help the business understand margins by product line.