AI / Cloud FinOps Lead (COGS Visibility & Optimization)

About Rox

Rox is building the AI-native revenue operating system for modern go-to-market teams. Backed by Sequoia, GV, and General Catalyst, we’re working with some of the most ambitious enterprise teams to replace fragmented CRM workflows with intelligent, autonomous systems. Rox connects data across the GTM stack, deploys AI agents to do real work, and gives revenue leaders a clear, shared picture of what actually drives outcomes.

We’re a small, fast-moving Series A team taking on one of software’s most entrenched categories — and we’re winning by combining deep technical rigor with obsessive focus on usefulness.

About the Finance Team

Finance at Rox is not a back-office function — it’s an operating partner to Engineering, Product, and Go-To-Market. The team builds the systems that make performance measurable, tradeoffs explicit, and scaling decisions repeatable.

As Rox scales AI-driven workloads, COGS visibility and optimization become foundational to how we manage gross margin, pricing, and product strategy. This role sits at the center of that effort.

About the Role

This is a founding-level AI / Cloud FinOps Lead role with end-to-end ownership of COGS visibility and optimization.

You will sit at the intersection of Finance, Engineering, and Product, responsible for making costs measurable, attributable, and actionable — without compromising latency, reliability, or customer experience. This role is both deeply analytical and highly operational: you’ll build the cost model, establish trusted metrics, and translate insight into concrete optimization initiatives that leadership acts on.

If you enjoy turning complex AI and cloud cost systems into clear decision frameworks — and want real ownership — this role is built for that.

What You’ll Do

• Define the Cost Model
Partner with Engineering to specify instrumentation, pipelines, and attribution so COGS can be tracked at the right granularity — by customer, workflow/action, request, model, token type, and external dependencies (e.g., AI search APIs), across compute, storage, and network.

• Build the Analytics Layer
Own the source of truth for unit economics in our BI stack (Sigma), with trusted definitions for usage and cost metrics such as tokens per action, $/token, $/request, and $/customer or workflow.

• Profitability & Decision Support
Build profitability views by customer, model, and workload to support pricing, packaging, and product decisions using real unit economics.

• Drive Optimization Strategy
Translate data into concrete initiatives — model routing, prompt and context limits, caching strategies, infrastructure tuning, and vendor usage changes — with estimated savings and explicit cost vs. latency or quality tradeoffs.

• Orchestrate Follow-Through
Establish a repeatable weekly and monthly cadence for unit-economics and profitability reviews; provide leadership with clear decision support on major tradeoffs.

• Anomaly Detection & Deep Dives
Create variance detection to surface cost spikes and regressions early; run deep dives and validate findings closely with Engineering.

What Success Looks Like

• In your first few days: You understand Rox’s AI and cloud stack well enough to map major cost drivers and visibility gaps.

• Within a few weeks: Measurement requirements are defined with Engineering, and a consistent unit-economics cadence is running with trusted metrics.

• Within a few months: A durable COGS analytics layer is live, and you’re driving measurable margin improvements through prioritized optimization initiatives that leadership acts on.

Must-Have Skills

• FinOps & Cloud Cost Expertise
Experience owning cloud cost management, COGS attribution, or unit economics in cloud-heavy (ideally AI-heavy) environments.

• AI / ML Cost Literacy
Strong understanding of AI/ML cost dynamics — including token economics, model inference, and RAG-related costs — and how to translate them into actionable unit economics.

• Data Fluency
High proficiency in SQL and comfort working directly with raw billing exports and warehouse tables.

• BI & Metrics Ownership
Ability to build trusted, well-defined metrics and views in modern BI tools (Sigma, Looker, Tableau, etc.).

• Strategic Communication
Ability to translate technical cost data into clear financial narratives and decision frameworks for leadership.

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code, observability tooling, or engineering telemetry systems

• Experience with major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)

• Background in FP&A or strategic finance with a strong technical bias

Why This Role Exists

As Rox scales — more models, more customers, more actions per workflow — AI and cloud COGS become both a scaling constraint and a strategic lever. This role exists to build the operating system for COGS visibility and optimization: connecting product behavior to infrastructure dollars, surfacing real tradeoffs, and driving sustained margin improvements as we grow.

If you’re excited about owning this problem end-to-end and shaping how a company scales AI responsibly and profitably, this role offers rare scope and impact.