At Hostelworld (Permanent), in Porto, Portugal
Expires at: 2026-03-26
Remote policy: Full remote

WHO YOU'LL WORK WITH

The SRE Senior FinOps Engineer is the domain owner for cloud financial operations. You will shift us from reactive cost reporting to proactive optimisation and forecasting, partnering closely with SRE, DBAs, Product Engineering and Finance to create visibility, governance and a culture of cost accountability across Google Cloud Platform. Your remit includes using GCP billing exports, dashboards and tagging to drive decisions, as well as hands‑on optimisation of compute, storage and databases.

You will sit in the SRE/DBA organisation and partner daily with Senior SREs and DBAs, while working cross‑functionally with Product Engineering and Finance to align spend decisions with reliability, performance and business goals.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Visibility and analysis

Create a single source of truth for cloud cost and usage using GCP Billing exports, BigQuery and Looker/Tableau; deliver self‑serve dashboards that show spend by project, team and service.
Design and govern a resource labelling/tagging standard; audit for compliance and drive adoption across environments.
Implement budgets and alerts on all projects, with clear ownership and escalation paths.

Optimisation and engineering

Maximise Committed Use Discounts on steady workloads; monitor utilisation and renewals.
Right‑size GCE VMs, Cloud Run, GKE node pools and Cloud SQL; tune storage lifecycle policies to move cold data to cheaper classes.
Identify and remove idle or orphaned resources such as unattached disks and unused load balancers.
Automate savings where sensible, for example scheduling dev/test shutdowns or flagging untagged resources using Cloud Functions or light scripting.

Forecasting and financial partnership

Build dashboard for rolling 12–18 month forecasts linked to business drivers like traffic, orders, storage and data transfer; maintain and explain variances.
Translate cloud consumption into business metrics such as cost‑per‑booking and cost‑per‑active‑user; partner with Finance on month‑end, accruals and variance analysis.

Governance, operating rhythm and culture

Lead a monthly Cloud Cost Review with tech leads and budget owners, agree actions and track outcomes to closure.
Embed FinOps practices that empower engineers to take cost‑aware action within SLO and reliability constraints.
Contribute to SRE runbooks, standards and ways of working so cost, performance and availability trade‑offs are explicit and repeatable.

Main requirements

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

Expertise

SRE/DevOps Experience in Cloud Platforms like GCP/AWS/Azure
Proven FinOps experience at meaningful Cloud scale.
Hands‑on optimisation across compute, containers, databases and storage, with a track record of measurable savings that did not compromise reliability.
Strong data skills and automation skills with Python

Collaboration and influence

Able to partner with SRE, Platform and Product Engineering to convert recommendations into shipped changes, and to work with Finance to land accurate forecasts.
Clear, concise communicator who can influence without direct authority and coach engineers to make cost‑aware design choices.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE IN THE FIRST 12 MONTHS

Reduction in avoidable cloud waste through targeted engineering and governance, with baselines and measurement defined up front.
≥ 95% tagging compliance across production and shared services.
≥ 90% utilisation of CUDs on eligible steady workloads.
Showback live for all squads; budgets and alerts active on 100% of GCP projects.
Forecast model with ≤ 5% variance for steady‑state services at monthly close.
Monthly Cloud Cost Review established with ≥ 85% action closure rate quarter on quarter.

Nice to have

FinOps Certified Practitioner or Analyst, experience with GKE autoscaling and Cloud SQL Enterprise settings, and familiarity with infrastructure‑as‑code workflows.

Benefits & Perks

WHAT WE OFFER

Competitive salary & benefits
Enhanced annual leave plus 3 Wellbeing Days per year
Paid family leave (maternity, paternity, surrogacy & adoption)
Agile working (plus a Working from Abroad Policy!)
Support for your ongoing growth & development
Inclusive people policies (sickness, menopause, compassionate and fertility leave)
A chance to give back to your local community with 5 paid volunteering days

OUR BEHAVIOURS

Grow others - We fundamentally believe that investing in growing others benefits everyone, whether it's helping them develop hard or soft skills. We want learning and growing to be part of our DNA to help makes us a better team, together.
Master it - We are obsessed with our area of expertise and enjoy developing our skills. We rarely take things at face value; we investigate, interrogate, and always look for ‘the why,’ and wherever possible, we use data to find the best solution.
Collaborate - We are in it together, for the tough stuff and the celebrations too. To achieve the best results, we need expertise from all areas of the organisation, and we wholeheartedly welcome diverse thinking.
Adapt - We work fluidly, adapting to new information and the evolving environment while staying committed to our goals. Innovation and experimentation fuel our projects and we’re never afraid to pivot.
Deliver - Our focus is always on the end result; we value outcomes over activity. We collaborate to deliver work at speed without dropping any of our other behaviours.

We believe in talented and diverse teams that reflect the diversity of our customers and the communities in which we operate. Everyone brings different perspectives and experiences. We lay out the above requirements to guide applicants to the experiences that we believe will allow you to be successful in the role. If you don’t meet them all, please consider applying if you think you can still perform the role as described.

Senior FinOps Engineer, SRE