Snowflake Platform / FinOps Engineer
Location:Dallas, TX area preferred (hybrid)
Type: Contract
We're looking for a Snowflake platform engineer with strong FinOps skills to analyze an enterprise Snowflake environment's consumption and make its costs predictable and controllable. You'll mine usage metadata to find what's driving spend. You'll deliver a quick-win optimization memo early in the engagement. You'll also set up the forecasting, attribution, and monitoring the client needs to budget with confidence.
Responsibilities
- Analyze historical credit, compute, storage, and cloud services consumption to find the main cost drivers by warehouse, workload, user, and team.
- Produce a prioritized quick-win memo covering warehouse sizing, auto-suspend, workload isolation, query tuning, and storage and retention changes, with estimated savings for each.
- Build cost forecasting models and budgets, and recommend controls such as resource monitors, alerts, and tagging so that spend is predictable before workloads run.
- Evaluate the cost of storing and querying long-retained historical data, and recommend lower-cost alternatives.
- Develop showback and chargeback methods, efficiency KPIs, and executive-level cost reporting.
Required
- 5+ years in cloud data platform engineering, including 3+ years administering and optimizing Snowflake.
- Proven Snowflake cost analysis experience using ACCOUNT_USAGE and ORGANIZATION_USAGE views, and a thorough understanding of Snowflake pricing and credit models.
- Experience with Informatica IDMC or IDQ workloads running against Snowflake, and with how pipeline design affects consumption.
- Working knowledge of at least one competing platform, such as Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, Google BigQuery, or Amazon Redshift, sufficient to compare cost and pricing models.
- Strong SQL, and experience building usage and cost dashboards.
- Ability to turn technical findings into clear business recommendations.
Highly Desired
- SnowPro Core or Advanced certification, and FinOps Certified Practitioner.
- Hands-on experience with Databricks or Microsoft Fabric.
- Experience with Snowflake cost-management tools, either native (Budgets, Cost Management) or third party.
- Python scripting to automate monitoring and cost analysis.
- Power BI or Tableau.
