Senior Technical Program Manager - Finops

Axon Axon · Enterprise · Office, WA · 1505 SAAS Ops

This role is for a Senior Technical Program Manager focused on FinOps within an enterprise AI company. The primary responsibility is to partner with engineering and product management teams to optimize cloud spending by providing budget insights, forecasting, and guidance during architectural design. The role emphasizes driving process improvements, managing risks, and building trust with senior leaders to ensure cost-effective development and deployment of AI-related services. While the company is AI-focused, this role itself is not directly involved in building or researching AI models, but rather in managing the financial aspects of cloud infrastructure that supports AI development.

What you'd actually do

  1. Lead execution across product management, engineering, and design teams to build excellent, data-driven project plans and schedules.
  2. Drive process improvements in your space to build better faster so they teams are more effective and can deliver with higher velocity because of your impact.
  3. Own your dependencies & invent and simplify as you face challenges pushing everyone towards the right outcome.
  4. Tracking all major risks/issues/roadmaps and ensure clear communication of issues
  5. Build trust with senior leaders by aligning your priorities with theirs, providing timely, accurate, and succinct status updates, and helping other teams when needed

Skills

Required

  • leadership skills
  • partner with engineering and product management teams
  • drive projects from inception, through design, development, and deployment
  • optimize spending decisions
  • empower engineering teams with budgets
  • understand, forecast, and optimize their spending
  • maintaining their development velocity
  • worked for several years with engineering teams in cloud-hosted distributed service environments
  • proven track record of executing and coordinating complex software deliverables across multiple teams and job roles
  • partnered with engineering and finance VPs
  • knows a lot or can research what they don’t about how AWS and Azure charge for their services
  • guide teams during architectural design to pick the best alternative
  • left-shifting financial understanding into software design
  • developing this function into a repeatable process that scales beyond your individual contributions
  • build excellent, data-driven project plans and schedules
  • Drive process improvements
  • build better faster
  • deliver with higher velocity
  • Own your dependencies
  • invent and simplify
  • face challenges pushing everyone towards the right outcome
  • Tracking all major risks/issues/roadmaps
  • ensure clear communication of issues
  • Build trust with senior leaders
  • aligning your priorities with theirs
  • providing timely, accurate, and succinct status updates
  • helping other teams when needed
  • Leading by example with thoroughness, detail, and care for our customers
  • Work with all levels of technical staff across software and hardware engineering
  • earning their trust
  • holding them accountable
  • problem solving alongside them
  • capture and improve detailed process and software architectural documentation
  • Working knowledge of the public cloud providers
  • Working knowledge of how networking works in AWS and Azure
  • 2+ years of experience in Cloud FinOps engineering analysis and Cloud cost optimization
  • 2+ years in cloud operations role managing Cloud environments, budgets, forecasts and implementing financial controls
  • Strong principles of financial analysis
  • Analytical skills and experience with cost optimization
  • Excellent SQL querying, Excel, and charting/graphing skills
  • Ability to gain trust querying and analyzing data accurately
  • Ability to communicate effectively and deliver presentations
  • Understanding of cloud cost management tools
  • Some experience with containerized environments and Terraform
  • Some experience with automation/development languages (PowerShell, Bash, Python)
  • Experience working on multi-million-dollar environments
  • Ability to influence engineering teams to optimize spending
  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software/Electrical Engineering, Data Science, or other related field
  • 7+ years professional experience in leading and managing system/software delivery
  • at least 2 specifically in a technical program management role
  • High degree of competency and proven success with project management including: Agile Software Development Lifecycle methodology, identifying and managing risks, tracking dependencies and milestones, and communicating overall project status
  • Evidence in work history of owning and driving large, ambiguous technical software programs
  • You are able to learn quickly
  • deal with ambiguity
  • effectively partner with others to reduce ambiguity
  • Strong interpersonal skills including mentoring, coaching, collaborating, influencing and team building
  • Strong written and verbal English communication skills

Nice to have

  • Experienced with enterprise SaaS or other mission critical software product is a plus.
  • Experienced with cloud IaaS and PaaS offering such as AWS and Azure is a plus.

What the JD emphasized

  • proven track record of executing and coordinating complex software deliverables across multiple teams and job roles
  • knows a lot or can research what they don’t about how AWS and Azure charge for their services
  • guide teams during architectural design to pick the best alternative
  • left-shifting financial understanding into software design
  • developing this function into a repeatable process that scales beyond your individual contributions