Senior Technical Program Manager - FinOps

Overview

Join Axon and be a Force for Good.

At Axon, we're on a mission to Protect Life. We're explorers, pursuing society's most critical safety and justice issues with our ecosystem of devices and cloud software. Like our products, we work better together. We connect with candor and care, seeking out diverse perspectives from our customers, communities and each other.

Life at Axon is fast-paced, challenging and meaningful. Here, you'll take ownership and drive real change. Constantly grow as you work hard for a mission that matters at a company where you matter.

As a Technical Program Manager, you will leverage your leadership skills and expertise to partner with engineering and product management teams to drive projects from inception, through design, development, and deployment.

This role will operate in a five person team at the intersection of Engineering, Product, and Finance, to optimize spending decisions that are aligned with our product and financial strategy. We are not developing cost-controls and approvals; we empower our engineering teams with budgets and help them understand, forecast, and optimize their spending while maintaining their development velocity.

We are looking for an experienced Technical Program Manager who has worked for several years with engineering teams in cloud-hosted distributed service environments, and has a proven track record of executing and coordinating complex software deliverables across multiple teams and job roles. You will be partnered with engineering and finance VPs. You should know a lot or be able to research what you don’t about how AWS and Azure charge for their services to guide teams during architectural design to pick the best alternative.

Success will involve translating financial understanding into software design; failure would be launching a feature that is too expensive to run. Amazing success will be developing this function into a repeatable process that scales beyond your individual contributions.

Reports to: Director of Technical Program Management

Direct Reports: None

Location
:
This role is based out of our Seattle, WA office and follows a hybrid schedule. We rely on in-person collaboration and ask that team members work onsite Tuesdays through Fridays, with the flexibility to work remotely on Mondays, unless there is an approved workplace accommodation. We believe that connection fuels innovation, and our in-office culture is designed to foster meaningful teamwork, mentorship, and shared success.

• Lead execution across product management, engineering, and design teams to build excellent, data-driven project plans and schedules.
• Drive process improvements in your space to build better faster so the teams are more effective and can deliver with higher velocity because of your impact.
• Own your dependencies and invent and simplify as you face challenges pushing everyone towards the right outcome.
• Track all major risks/issues/roadmaps and ensure clear communication of issues.
• Build trust with senior leaders by aligning your priorities with theirs, providing timely, accurate, and succinct status updates, and helping other teams when needed.
• Lead by example with thoroughness, detail, and care for our customers.
• Work with all levels of technical staff across software and hardware engineering, earning their trust, holding them accountable and problem solving alongside them.
• Help teams capture and improve detailed process and software architectural documentation as needed.
• Working knowledge of the public cloud providers.
• Working knowledge of how networking works in AWS and Azure.
• 2+ years of experience in Cloud Fin Ops engineering analysis and Cloud cost optimization.
• 2+ years in cloud operations role managing cloud environments, budgets, forecasts and implementing financial controls.
• Strong principles of financial analysis.
• Analytical skills and experience with cost optimization.
• Excellent SQL querying, Excel, and charting/graphing skills.
• Ability to gain trust querying and analyzing data accurately.
• Ability to communicate effectively and deliver presentations.
• Understanding of cloud cost management tools.
• Some experience with containerized environments and Terraform.
• Some experience with automation/development languages (Power Shell, Bash, Python).
• Experience working on multi-million-dollar environments.
• Ability to influence engineering teams to optimize spending.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software/Electrical Engineering, Data Science, or other related field
• 7+ years professional experience in leading and managing system/software delivery, with at least 2 specifically in a technical program management role.
• High degree of competency and proven success with project management including:
  Agile Software Development Lifecycle methodology, identifying and managing risks, tracking dependencies and milestones, and communicating overall project status.
• Evidence in work history of owning and driving large, ambiguous technical software…