Senior Manager, Finops Data Applications And Operations

Sr. Technical Manager – FinOps

The Sr. Technical Manager – FinOps is a senior technical specialist responsible for driving measurable cloud cost savings, financial accountability, and engineering led optimization across large scale data and analytics platforms. This role will focus heavily on FinOps optimization for Snowflake, AWS EMR, and broader AWS cloud data services (EC2, S3, Lambda, Redshift, Glue, DynamoDB, EKS).

The manager will architect and implement automation for tagging compliance, budget guardrails, workload efficiency, and anomaly detection, ensuring cost efficient design across modern data workloads. This role collaborates across Cloud Platform, Data Engineering, DevOps, Security, and Finance to deliver cost transparency (chargeback/showback), enforce governance using policy as code, and reduce spend without compromising performance, availability, or security. Grounded in FinOps principles and tooling including centralized dashboards, cost observability, and automated policy enforcement the Senior Manager will ensure that Snowflake, EMR, and AWS-based data pipelines are engineered with cost efficiency and scalability in mind. This role will shape the operating model for innovative optimization solutions across Marriott's multi cloud environment.

Candidate Profile

Education and Experience

Required:

• Undergraduate degree in Engineering or Computer Science, or equivalent experience/certification. • 7+ years of experience in Information Technology, including: o 5+ years in cloud technologies with IaaS/PaaS/SaaS across AWS, AliCloud, or Azure. o 3+ years of hands-on Snowflake cost optimization, including warehouse sizing, credit analysis, query optimization, and Resource Monitor usage. o 3+ years of AWS EMR optimization experience, including cluster right sizing, Spark tuning, Spot strategy management, and EMR Serverless. o 3+ years developing FinOps optimization strategies across AWS services (S3, EC2, Lambda, Redshift, Glue, DynamoDB, EKS). o 3+ years of scripting/automation using Python, Bash, or similar languages. • Experience with FinOps / Cloud Cost Management tools (CloudHealth, Cloudability, AWS Cost Explorer, Snowflake native cost tools). • Strong analytical skills with proven ability to drive cost savings at scale. • Experience managing multi million dollar cloud budgets across data engineering workloads. • Deep understanding of cloud pricing models, optimization levers, alternatives, and financial governance. • Demonstrated ability to partner with technical teams to enforce cost efficient architecture.

Preferred:

• 2+ years with infrastructure automation using Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation, or similar IaC tools. • Experience with container platforms (Docker, OpenShift, Kubernetes, ECS, GKE). • Experience engineering large-scale distributed data systems (Spark, Presto, Iceberg, Snowflake). • Experience delivering solutions in a global, fast paced enterprise. • Ability to quickly learn and apply emerging AWS and Snowflake capabilities (Iceberg Tables, Serverless Compute, EMR on EKS, etc.). • Excellent problem-solving and cross-functional leadership skills. • Strong experience across the following platforms: o Operating Systems: RHEL, Oracle Linux, Windows, CentOS o Storage: AWS S3 lifecycle, replication, backup/recovery best practices o Security: Cloud security, compliance, data protection, encryption, vulnerability tooling o Databases: Snowflake, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Oracle • Excellent written and verbal communication skills. • Understanding of ITCM/ITRM automation best practices.

Core Work Activities

FinOps Engineering & Optimization

• Analyze usage, performance, and cost patterns across Snowflake, AWS EMR, and AWS data pipelines. • Optimize costs across Snowflake warehouses, queries, materialized views, clustering, retention, and compute scheduling. • Optimize AWS EMR via cluster lifecycle automation, Spark tuning, Spot strategy design, autoscaling, and EMR Serverless migration. • Engineer optimizations for AWS services (EC2/Autoscaling, EKS cost governance, S3 lifecycle, Redshift tuning, Glue job efficiency, DynamoDB capacity, Lambda usage). • Implement automated tools and pipelines for anomaly detection, budget enforcement, reservation planning, and tagging compliance. • Build unified cost dashboards for Snowflake, EMR, and AWS consumption. • Collaborate with Finance to align data platform spend to budgets and forecast models.

Technical Leadership

• Provide engineering leadership, governance, and architectural direction for cost efficient cloud solution delivery. • Serve as the technical point of contact for Snowflake and EMR optimization initiatives. • Lead environment assessments to identify inefficiencies and drive technical improvements. • Contribute to lifecycle strategies, platform standards, and cloud governance models. • Use capacity/performance data to influence future data platform design and usage patterns. • Present cost insights, savings opportunities, and technical recommendations to leadership teams. • Mentor engineers on AWS data engineering efficiency and Snowflake/EMR optimization best practices. • Lead project requirements gathering, architecture design, chargeback modeling, and IaC development. • Collaborate with Enterprise Architecture to ensure cloud-native services meet cost and support guardrails.

Delivering Technology

• Define and enhance operational and technical standards for cost efficient cloud data workloads. • Balance business needs with performance, availability, and cost constraints. • Work closely with Data Engineering, Cloud Platforms, and DevOps to resolve complex issues. • Provide oversight for provisioning, managing, and maintaining Snowflake, EMR, and AWS data ecosystems. • Ensure monitoring and alerting cover compute, storage, and cost anomalies across Snowflake and AWS workloads. • Develop internal processes, tooling, and training to support cost-efficient production operations. • Perform quantitative/qualitative analyses to ensure high availability and zero defect operations. • Lead updates, upgrades, and continuous improvement for AWS and Snowflake environments.

IT Governance

• Adhere to all established IT governance, security, architectural, and compliance standards. • Execute automated compliance checks (tagging, budget guardrails, data retention). • Maintain proper balance between operational risk and business needs. • Follow defined project management processes and contribute to improvements.

Service Provider Management

• Coordinate with internal teams and cloud vendors to ensure high-quality execution. • Lead service provider oversight to ensure SLAs, KPIs, and optimization mandates are met. • Review operations, reporting, and analytics metrics to ensure continuous improvement.