Sr. Program Manager, R&D Operations

Category-defining tech. Career-defining work.

Lots of tech companies disrupt. But, many fail when they try to scale. We're different. CockroachDB makes it easier for companies to build and scale apps. This is how and why we're helping some of the most innovative companies on the planet. We tackle problems head-on and focus on solutions that create lasting impact.

Because when our customers win, we all win.

The Role

We are seeking a Senior Technical Program Manager, FinOps to join our Research & Development Operations team, based in Bengaluru, India. This is a high-visibility opportunity to define and mature our FinOps capabilities at Cockroach Labs, building on foundational work already underway across our engineering organization and taking our cloud financial management to a new level of rigor, scale, and competitive advantage. You will sit at the intersection of Engineering, Finance, and Operations, responsible for driving cost transparency, surfacing savings opportunities, and ensuring cloud infrastructure spend is managed with discipline and accountability.

Cockroach Labs operates a significant cloud infrastructure footprint to power CockroachDB Cloud and our internal engineering environments. As we scale, the ability to understand, attribute, and optimize that spend is critical to our financial health and margin profile. This role will own the FinOps program end-to-end: stewarding the tooling that tracks cloud costs, partnering with Engineering and Finance to embed cost accountability across the organization, and building the cost allocation models that feed margin analysis and executive reporting.

R&D Operations plays a crucial role in enabling our organization to exceed customer expectations by shortening feedback loops and accelerating learning. By focusing on coordination and process effectiveness, R&D Operations minimizes friction and allows teams to concentrate on delivering high-quality products and services.

You Will

• Own and evolve the FinOps tooling platform used to track, report on, and analyze cloud infrastructure costs across AWS, GCP, and other providers, ensuring the data is accurate, timely, and actionable.
• Establish and run the FinOps operating cadence, including regular cost reviews, budget-vs-actuals variance analysis, anomaly detection, and a living optimization backlog with owners, timelines, and dollar-value targets.
• Build and maintain cost allocation frameworks that attribute cloud spend to products, teams, and customer workloads to support COGS calculation, unit economics, and margin analysis in partnership with Finance.
• Identify and prioritize cloud cost optimization opportunities, including rightsizing, committed use discounts (reserved instances/savings plans), idle resource cleanup, storage tiering, egress reduction, Kubernetes/container cost efficiency, and emerging AI and machine learning infrastructure costs such as GPU compute, model training pipelines, and inference workloads.
• Manage cloud budgets and forecasts in close partnership with Finance and Engineering leadership; explain variances, surface risks early, and drive corrective action before spend exceeds plan.
• Drive cost accountability across Engineering by establishing tagging and labeling standards, showback/chargeback models, and cost-aware development practices that embed FinOps into the engineering culture.
• Build executive-level dashboards and reporting to communicate cloud spend trends, savings realized, optimization pipeline, and forecast vs. actuals to senior leadership and the board.
• Partner cross-functionally with Engineering, Infrastructure, Procurement, and Finance to align cost reduction initiatives with platform roadmap priorities and business goals, without compromising service quality or engineering velocity.
• Define governance frameworks, best practices, and FinOps policies that can scale with the business, including vendor discount strategy, commitment management, and cloud budget governance.

The Expectations

In your first 30 days, you will orient yourself by conducting a thorough review of Cockroach Labs' cloud infrastructure footprint, existing FinOps tooling, and current state of cost attribution and tagging. You will meet with key stakeholders across R&D and Finance to understand how cloud spend is tracked today, where the gaps are, and what decisions are being made without the data they deserve. Working closely with Finance, you will kick off the design of a tagging hierarchy that will allow cloud infrastructure costs to be viewed and rolled up across the dimensions that matter most: by team, product, environment, and customer workload.

By day 60, you will have finalized the tagging taxonomy with Finance sign-off and begun driving adoption and enforcement across Engineering. You will have established yourself as the SME on our FinOps tooling platform, leading the first internal training, handling configuration changes, and becoming the go-to resource for questions from budget owners and team leads. You will also have built and published the first cost optimization backlog, identifying the highest-value efficiency opportunities surfaced by the tool and beginning to execute on the most actionable of them.

By day 90, you will have established yourself as the definitive expert on where Cockroach Labs' cloud spend is occurring, and why. You will have partnered with Finance and budget owners to put budgets in place by category, delivered the first quarterly cloud spend report to leadership, and helped teams build the dashboards and showback views they need to make cost-aware decisions. When anomalies or trends surface, you will be the person who can explain them to an engineer, a finance partner, or an executive, with clarity and confidence.