When platform engineers lead FinOps: Driving reliability and $20M in savings

Platform engineers have long been guardians of reliability, designing resilient control planes, enforcing SLAs, and keeping 1,000s of workloads alive. Yet cloud cost is often handed off to FinOps teams armed with scripts and spreadsheets, unaware of how platforms actually work. The result is “savings” that trade reliability for cost.

This talk is a call for platform engineers to adopt cost-conscious design, operations, and culture. As platform owners, they know how systems respond to changes and where optimizations can be safely made without compromising SLAs.

At Expedia Group, this mindset saved $20M in 2025 while improving reliability across 500+ clusters and 10K+ workloads. The talk breaks down three key patterns:

• Revisiting the legacy
• Establishing a view and baselines
• Embracing re-architecture without fear

Attendees will leave with a field-tested playbook to embed FinOps into their platforms, with no prior FinOps knowledge required, and a sense of responsibility toward efficiency.