About the Role
Twilio is seeking a motivated, curious, and collaborative Senior Financial Analyst to join our R&D Finance team. As Twilio enters the "Unified Platform" era—consolidating SendGrid, Voice, and Messaging into a single unified SDK and Console—and accelerates the rollout of advanced platform features like Agent Connect and Conversation Relay, our R&D Finance organization is evolving its structure to move from tactical execution to elevated strategic partnership.
In this high-impact role, you will serve as the primary autonomous finance partner for our R&D engineering and product teams. The scope of this role is focused exclusively on Cloud infrastructure costs (AWS and hosting spend), which are becoming increasingly complex as Twilio builds in a platform context, with our global hosting infrastructure spend approaching ~$470M annually. This position requires an independent thinker who understands the underlying platform architecture and can translate technical platform adjustments into dynamic financial forecasting while navigating unpredictable, non-linear cloud billing layouts.
Responsibilities
- Strategic Business Partnership: Act as an autonomous finance partner to R&D, Product, and Engineering leadership. Lead cross-functional conversations to determine whether infrastructure cost surges are driven by healthy customer volume growth or inefficient engineering configurations.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner seamlessly across Accounting, Engineering, FP&A, and FinOps teams to ensure accurate COGS/OpEx accounting classifications and product-line allocation of cloud costs, while driving upstream process automation and data integrity.
- Dynamic Financial Forecasting: Lead the monthly and quarterly forecasting process for R&D hosting infrastructure. Build dynamic models capable of managing complex, non-linear cloud billings from major providers and LLM partners.
- Operational Variance Analysis: Conduct deep-dive variance analyses and link financial outcomes directly to usage changes driven by product/market dynamics, translating technical platform adjustments into clear financial impacts.
- Cost-Containment Optimization: Proactively identify engineering cost-containment opportunities and partner with product managers to design and track cloud cost-efficiency strategies while maintaining platform performance.
- Financial Modeling: Lead strategic projects, analysis, deepdives to drive ROI opportunities and costs reductions. Build flexible financial models to support scenario planning, product expansions (, and support data-driven investment trade-offs.
- Infrastructure Metrics Tracking: Track and analyze vendor spend patterns, cloud capacity utilization, and budget consumption across core R&D functions.
- Strategic Communication: Communicate complex financial analyses and technical cloud cost structures in clear, actionable ways to non-financial audiences and engineering stakeholders.
Required Qualifications
- Experience: 5+ years of finance experience in progressive FP&A, operational finance or strategic corporate finance roles.
- Analytical Problem-Solving: Detail-oriented mindset with strong analytical, problem-solving, and deep-dive capabilities to thoroughly investigate complex technical issues and evaluate massive cloud data footprints.
- Financial Modeling: Expertise in leveraging Excel/Google Sheets to construct multi-variable, driver-based models, specifically for completing complex unit economics and cloud infrastructure spend analysis.
- Ambiguity & Autonomy: Proven ability to operate independently and thrive within highly ambiguous environments, moving beyond basic data pulling to drive strategic engineering conversations.
- Communication: Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with a proven ability to translate complex cloud architecture variances to non-financial product stakeholders.
- Process Simplification & Automation: Demonstrated ability to drive simplification and automation of financial and business processes, modeling and reporting.
Desired Qualifications
- Education: Bachelor's degree in Finance, Business, Economics, Computer Science, or a related operational field.
- Industry Frameworks: Direct experience managing cloud infrastructure/hosting spend within a high-growth Technology, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), or Cloud environment.
- Systems & Visibility Tools: Familiarity with enterprise planning applications (Anaplan), ERP systems (Oracle), or specialized cloud cost optimization.