Director, Cloud Platform & FinOps – CloudZero

About the Role:
CloudZero seeks a FinOps practitioner, evangelist, and engineering leader to drive our internal FinOps strategy and manage our CloudOps / Developer Experience (DX) team. This role is ideal for someone who thrives as a player-coach—leading by example while gradually transitioning into a full-time leadership role as the team expands.

Today, everyone at CloudZero watches our cloud spend, but it’s no one’s first job. You will change that, working closely with finance and engineering teams to optimize cloud costs, improve visibility, and drive cost efficiency. As a CloudZero power user, you will leverage our platform to implement best-in-class FinOps practices, share insights, and educate internal teams on cost optimization strategies. You’ll help spread the word about how we use the platform to achieve results by writing blogs, attending meetups, and speaking at conferences.

Beyond FinOps, you will manage and grow our CloudOps / Developer Experience (DX) team, ensuring that CloudZero’s engineering organization operates efficiently in the cloud. You would be responsible for managing and coaching the engineers on this team, helping set backlog, tracking projects, and communicating back to the engineering organization on what initiatives the team is undertaking and what impacts they are having. It’s a responsibility that has the potential to impact the entire engineering organization at CloudZero.

Why you:
This role uniquely combines technical leadership with industry influence, shaping CloudZero’s FinOps strategy and the broader FinOps community. If you’re excited about optimizing cloud costs, improving developer experience, and being a recognized FinOps thought leader, we’d love to hear from you!

What You’ll Do:

FinOps Evangelism & Leadership

• Act as a FinOps thought leader—advocating best practices internally and externally.
• Speak at industry conferences, meetups, and webinars to share insights on cloud cost optimization and FinOps implementation.
• Engage with the FinOps and DevOps communities, contributing to discussions, blogs, and public forums.
• Collaborate with finance and engineering teams to ensure accurate cloud cost reporting, track key metrics, and identify savings opportunities.
• Optimize CloudZero’s own cloud spend using our platform, driving measurable cost savings.

Developer Experience & Engineering Enablement

• Lead and grow the DX team, coaching engineers and shaping the team’s long-term strategy.
• Improve developer efficiency by streamlining tools, processes, and automation.
• Manage infrastructure and vendor contracts to optimize costs and enhance developer workflows.
• Track and communicate DX initiatives to the broader engineering organization, demonstrating impact.

Requirements:

• Experience leading or working within FinOps, DevOps, CloudOps, or Developer Experience teams.
• Strong AWS expertise; experience with other cloud providers is a plus.
• 2+ years of engineering management experience.
• Exceptional communication skills—comfortable speaking at events and engaging with technical and non-technical audiences.
• A passion for coaching engineers and enabling high-performance teams.
• High-agency, action-oriented mindset with a drive to make an impact.