Senior Financial Analyst, R&D Finance

Twilio•,

3d•$96,640 - $142,000•Remote

About The Position

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.

Requirements

5+ years of finance experience in progressive FP&A, operational finance or strategic corporate finance roles.
Detail-oriented mindset with strong analytical, problem-solving, and deep-dive capabilities to thoroughly investigate complex technical issues and evaluate massive cloud data footprints.
Expertise in leveraging Excel/Google Sheets to construct multi-variable, driver-based models, specifically for completing complex unit economics and cloud infrastructure spend analysis.
Proven ability to operate independently and thrive within highly ambiguous environments, moving beyond basic data pulling to drive strategic engineering conversations.
Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with a proven ability to translate complex cloud architecture variances to non-financial product stakeholders.
Demonstrated ability to drive simplification and automation of financial and business processes, modeling and reporting.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor's degree in Finance, Business, Economics, Computer Science, or a related operational field.
Direct experience managing cloud infrastructure/hosting spend within a high-growth Technology, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), or Cloud environment.
Familiarity with enterprise planning applications (Anaplan), ERP systems (Oracle), or specialized cloud cost optimization tools.
Demonstrated ability to use Gen AI tools to drive simplification and automation.

Responsibilities

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.
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.
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.
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.
Proactively identify engineering cost-containment opportunities and partner with product managers to design and track cloud cost-efficiency strategies while maintaining platform performance.
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.
Track and analyze vendor spend patterns, cloud capacity utilization, and budget consumption across core R&D functions.
Communicate complex financial analyses and technical cloud cost structures in clear, actionable ways to non-financial audiences and engineering stakeholders.