Applied Scientist, Customer Finops Intelligence

Snowflake Snowflake · Data AI · CA-Menlo Park, United States · Sales

This role involves building analytical models and benchmarking frameworks using platform usage signals to understand customer efficiency and identify opportunities for optimization. It requires expertise in data engineering, unsupervised ML for constructing peer groups, and statistical rigor to handle complex datasets. The goal is to translate raw signals into data-driven insights for customer advisory assets and field teams.

What you'd actually do

  1. Develop and maintain peer benchmarking models using platform usage signals to produce unit economic metrics
  2. Construct peer groups using unsupervised ML techniques (clustering, dimensionality reduction) on account-level feature vectors — combining industry vertical, usage fingerprint, and size normalization into meaningful comparable cohorts
  3. Engineer a benchmarking feature store from large-scale platform usage datasets using Snowpark and dbt, covering compute, storage, and workload dimensions at account and industry level
  4. Apply statistical rigor to handle skewed distributions, outlier accounts, and temporal variation in usage patterns across a highly diverse customer base
  5. Package benchmarking outputs into repeatable advisory assets — cost optimization playbooks, benchmarking dashboards, and narrative summaries — that can be consumed by field teams and scaled across the customer base

Skills

Required

  • MS or PhD in Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Econometrics, Computer Science, or a quantitative field
  • 5+ years of hands-on experience in applied data science, quantitative research, or value engineering
  • SQL
  • Python (pandas/polars, scikit-learn, statsmodels)
  • Unsupervised ML (clustering, dimensionality reduction, anomaly detection)
  • Percentile-based benchmarks and cohort analyses
  • Communication and storytelling skills
  • Ambiguity tolerance

Nice to have

  • Prior experience at a cloud platform, SaaS analytics company, or management consulting firm working on benchmarking, telemetry analytics, or customer value modeling
  • Snowflake's platform architecture
  • Snowpark
  • FinOps, cost optimization, or cloud economics
  • Economic modeling or industry benchmarking methodologies
  • Presenting analytical findings to field teams or customer stakeholders

What the JD emphasized

  • MS or PhD in Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Econometrics, Computer Science, or a quantitative field
  • 5+ years of hands-on experience in applied data science, quantitative research, or value engineering
  • Expert-level SQL
  • Strong proficiency in Python (pandas/polars, scikit-learn, statsmodels) for statistical modeling and ML
  • Deep experience with unsupervised ML: clustering (k-means, DBSCAN, hierarchical), PCA/UMAP, anomaly detection
  • Experience designing and interpreting percentile-based benchmarks and cohort analyses at scale
  • Comfort operating in ambiguous, greenfield environments where the methodology is yours to define

Other signals

  • ML models
  • feature stores
  • benchmarking frameworks
  • peer comparison methodologies
  • unsupervised ML