Bridging the gap between cost efficiency and engineering

A few years ago, most tech employees hadn’t even heard of finance engineering (also known as finance operations or “FinOps”). Now, thanks to innovation, tons of exciting new roles and industries like this one have emerged. FinOps is a cutting-edge field dedicated to enhancing efficiency in engineering operations. We sat down with Ziva Tubul, Wix’s Head of Finance Engineering, to learn more about this unique profession.

Can you explain what you do at Wix?

I joined Wix almost 4 years ago to bridge the gap between the tech and finance teams. In a nutshell, my role is to maximize the business value of cloud, production and AI environments. It supports timely, data-driven decisions and creates financial accountability by promoting collaboration across engineering, finance and business teams. When I say “optimization,” this can mean as much as a complete shift in development architecture. I’m also responsible for implementing these practices and fostering this new culture within the organization. In other words, my role is to create a financial engineering framework to make sure employees are accountable for their development and infrastructure budgets.

How did this field originate?

It’s a relatively new field. As everything transitioned to the cloud, companies began recognizing the business need for finance engineering and the value it brings. The cloud's payment model introduced flexibility, but also unpredictability in costs. This brought on a need to bridge the gap between finance and technology. Finance engineering emerged as a result, ensuring businesses could optimize their cloud spending while driving growth.

Which professional guild do you belong to – Finance or R&D?

At Wix, we’re part of the R&D guild. While in some companies, business analysts might lead this work, at Wix, it’s an engineering domain. That’s what sets us apart – our findings can lead to a complete rethinking of architecture or infrastructure for one or more of our products.

Currently, the main challenge is to improve accountability by transferring the remaining responsibilities to developers and engineers as part of their role.

"My role is to create a financial engineering framework to make sure employees are accountable for their development and infrastructure budgets."

Who is the perfect fit for this role?

The best person for this position would be someone who is a natural-born engineer with top-notch analytical skills. They should enjoy diving deep into data, conducting complex analyses and have strong project management skills to drive initiatives forward. Presentation skills are also crucial for conveying insights and recommendations. To excel, they need deep technological knowledge and a natural curiosity for tech. It’s a role that requires a mix of hands-on and strategic decision making.

We’re also hiring! Check out our open positions here >>> finance engineering roles at Wix

What does the day-to-day of a financial engineer look like? 

There are many stakeholders we work with, so a regular day involves a lot of communication. We often start with a finance meeting to review the budget and conduct analyses to ensure optimized spending and avoid deviations. A significant part of the day is spent working closely with purchasing managers, consulting on contracts related to the production stage – particularly the hosting budget, which mostly comes from cloud and network vendors. We work with purchasing to optimize these deals and align usage with our needs.

Our biggest stakeholders though are the R&D teams. We support them when they want to launch a new feature or project with significant costs, helping to determine the project’s PCO (project cost optimization). Lastly, a big part of the role is working with managers to ensure that our spending visibility drives strategic and well-informed decision making.

Can you shed some light on your personal initiative to lead and establish a financial engineering community?

It all started when I was at a conference in San Diego, California, where I gave a lecture on how we managed to save 24% of our costs in 2023. It was a great session where I shared our insights and tips from that process, and the impact was significant. After my lecture, several financial engineers from other companies approached me to discuss the session. We realized that, since our field is so new, there’s a real need for a professional community – a space where people can gather to ask questions, share project case studies, debate strategies and so on.

In most organizations, if they have a financial engineer, it’s usually just one or two people so there’s often a lack of peers to consult with. That’s when we had the idea to organize roundtable events. And people loved it! We gained many insights into our unique challenges, which emphasized the importance of building this community.

If 10 years ago the role didn’t exist, where do you see it going in 5-10 years from now?

The future of this field is that every engineer will be, in some way, a financial engineer. What I mean is that all engineers will be responsible for integrating cost efficiency organically, just like they ensure code quality or performance. This mindset will influence every development process.