Senior FinOps Engineer, SRE

ABOUT US

Our vision is to be the worlds leading social travel platform.

We are on a mission to help travellers find their people and create unforgettable moments together. Connections matter as much as destinations and we are building a global ecosystem to enable them.

Since the launch of our social network in the hostelling category in 2022 Hostelworld has experienced transformational growth. We have successfully welcomed over 2.6 million social members to our platform proving the strong demand for connection in travel. This vibrant community is not just booking trips; they are actively engaging co-creating and becoming our most powerful brand advocates. The platform is rich with user-generated content including a rapidly growing volume of customer testimonials and authentic travel stories that provide powerful social proof.

The growth in engagement is remarkable: the number of messages sent between travellers has grown significantly faster than the number of trips booked by social members demonstrating the deep social utility of our platform. This momentum is reflected in our robust financial health underscored by a strong balance sheet powered by an asset-light cash-generative business model.

We are not just another Online Travel Agent (OTA); we have created a new category of travel altogether: Social Travel. Our singular focus on helping travellers find people to hang out with is the foundation of our strategy. It has allowed us to build a powerful and defensible market position which attracts highly valuable customers and shifts more of our business onto our mobile-native apps.

While our app and social features create a sticky user experience our true competitive moat stems from the incredibly rich proprietary data set generated by our social network. As our community grows so does the value of this data creating a compounding network effect that is nearly impossible to replicate. This social flywheel allows us to understand traveller behaviour predict needs and personalise experiences in ways that generalist OTAs cannot match. It is the engine that will power our long-term differentiated growth and solidify our position as the sole player in the Social Travel category we created.

LOCATION

This role is based in Portugal. We have an office hub in Porto available for those who prefer a hybrid model where you can spend time with colleagues in-person. You will need to be able to commute to our office hub as required from time to time.

WHO YOULL WORK WITH

The SRE Senior FinOps Engineer is the domain owner for cloud financial operations. You will shift us from reactive cost reporting to proactive optimisation and forecasting partnering closely with SRE DBAs Product Engineering and Finance to create visibility governance and a culture of cost accountability across Google Cloud Platform. Your remit includes using GCP billing exports dashboards and tagging to drive decisions as well as handson optimisation of compute storage and databases.

You will sit in the SRE/DBA organisation and partner daily with Senior SREs and DBAs while working crossfunctionally with Product Engineering and Finance to align spend decisions with reliability performance and business goals.

WHAT YOULL DO

Visibility and analysis

• Create a single source of truth for cloud cost and usage using GCP Billing exports BigQuery and Looker/Tableau; deliver selfserve dashboards that show spend by project team and service.

• Design and govern a resource labelling/tagging standard; audit for compliance and drive adoption across environments.

• Implement budgets and alerts on all projects with clear ownership and escalation paths.

Optimisation and engineering

• Maximise Committed Use Discounts on steady workloads; monitor utilisation and renewals.

• Rightsize GCE VMs Cloud Run GKE node pools and Cloud SQL; tune storage lifecycle policies to move cold data to cheaper classes.

• Identify and remove idle or orphaned resources such as unattached disks and unused load balancers.

• Automate savings where sensible for example scheduling dev/test shutdowns or flagging untagged resources using Cloud Functions or light scripting.

Forecasting and financial partnership

• Build dashboard for rolling 1218 month forecasts linked to business drivers like traffic orders storage and data transfer; maintain and explain variances.

• Translate cloud consumption into business metrics such as costperbooking and costperactiveuser; partner with Finance on monthend accruals and variance analysis.

Governance operating rhythm and culture

• Lead a monthly Cloud Cost Review with tech leads and budget owners agree actions and track outcomes to closure.

• Embed FinOps practices that empower engineers to take costaware action within SLO and reliability constraints.

• Contribute to SRE runbooks standards and ways of working so cost performance and availability tradeoffs are explicit and repeatable.

WHAT WERE LOOKING FOR

Expertise

• SRE/DevOps Experience in Cloud Platforms like GCP/AWS/Azure

• Proven FinOps experience at meaningful Cloud scale.

• Handson optimisation across compute containers databases and storage with a track record of measurable savings that did not compromise reliability.

• Strong data skills and automation skills with Python

Collaboration and influence

• Able to partner with SRE Platform and Product Engineering to convert recommendations into shipped changes and to work with Finance to land accurate forecasts.

• Clear concise communicator who can influence without direct authority and coach engineers to make costaware design choices.

Nice to have

• FinOps Certified Practitioner or Analyst experience with GKE autoscaling and Cloud SQL Enterprise settings and familiarity with infrastructureascode workflows.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE IN THE FIRST 12 MONTHS

• Reduction in avoidable cloud waste through targeted engineering and governance with baselines and measurement defined up front.

• 95% tagging compliance across production and shared services.

• 90% utilisation of CUDs on eligible steady workloads.

• Showback live for all squads; budgets and alerts active on 100% of GCP projects.

• Forecast model with 5% variance for steadystate services at monthly close.

• Monthly Cloud Cost Review established with 85% action closure rate quarter on quarter.

WHAT WE OFFER

• Competitive salary & benefits

• Enhanced annual leave plus 3 Wellbeing Days per year

• Paid family leave (maternity paternity surrogacy & adoption)

• Agile working (plus a Working from Abroad Policy!)

• Support for your ongoing growth & development

• Inclusive people policies (sickness menopause compassionate and fertility leave)

• A chance to give back to your local community with 5 paid volunteering days

OUR BEHAVIOURS

• Grow others - We fundamentally believe that investing in growing others benefits everyone whether its helping them develop hard or soft skills. We want learning and growing to be part of our DNA to help makes us a better team together.

• Master it - We are obsessed with our area of expertise and enjoy developing our skills. We rarely take things at face value; we investigate interrogate and always look for the why and wherever possible we use data to find the best solution.

• Collaborate - We are in it together for the tough stuff and the celebrations too. To achieve the best results we need expertise from all areas of the organisation and we wholeheartedly welcome diverse thinking.

• Adapt - We work fluidly adapting to new information and the evolving environment while staying committed to our goals. Innovation and experimentation fuel our projects and were never afraid to pivot.

• Deliver - Our focus is always on the end result; we value outcomes over activity. We collaborate to deliver work at speed without dropping any of our other behaviours.
  

We believe in talented and diverse teams that reflect the diversity of our customers and the communities in which we operate. Everyone brings different perspectives and experiences. We lay out the above requirements to guide applicants to the experiences that we believe will allow you to be successful in the role. If you dont meet them all please consider applying if you think you can still perform the role as described.