Finding trained FP&A professionals isn't too much trouble for most companies. The tricky part is finding a candidate who has the right combination of technical and soft skills for your organization’s needs. The following interview questions will help you find a qualified FP&A professional for your company. Listen to their responses to get a sense of their reasoning, expertise, situational awareness, ambition, and individual attitude towards various aspects of the FP&A profession.

When businesses first transition to the cloud, they often prioritize performance and speed above all else. After all, the cloud is an exciting new world full of nearly unlimited resources ripe for the taking. Sooner or later, however, businesses must face the fact that speed and power come at a high financial price, and sometimes their original choices are not sustainable from a cost standpoint.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Google’s answer to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, is steadily gaining steam. Launched in 2008 — just two years after AWS — GCP has taken the bronze medal in public cloud services for years. While it still occupies third place, its market share has steadily expanded: In Q4 2021, GCP owned 9% of the public cloud market, and by Q3 2022, it had jumped to 11%.

Kinesis is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) product that collects, processes, and analyzes streaming data in real-time. It can process streaming video, audio, IoT data, application logs, and other data coming in from thousands of unique sources as it arrives, unlike technologies like Hadoop, which utilize batch processing (waiting for a complete dataset to arrive before processing and analyzing it).

DevOps has exploded in popularity since the concept first emerged in 2009. A DevOps approach encompasses both practices and tools that engineers use to build quality software more rapidly. Before DevOps, software development followed a “waterfall” model. Back then, developers would code first, then perform quality assurance (QA) testing, and fix any bugs or errors as necessary.

Alphabet. Netflix. Shopify. Amazon. Meta. Microsoft. These are just a few of the leading tech companies that recently laid off thousands of employees. Slashing jobs, because it is often one of the biggest expenses for tech companies, may seem like a quick fix, but it can be counterproductive, especially when it impacts experienced engineers. So, what are the specific reasons tech companies are cutting jobs? And what are the alternatives to layoffs?

It all started with a simple Slack message. If you need a refresher, gross margin is a business metric that calculates what percentage of revenue you take home as profit. To calculate it, you subtract your costs (often abbreviated as COGS, short for costs of goods sold) from your revenue and divide it by your total revenue, et voilà, gross margin. So, if your annual revenue is $10M and your COGS are $3M, your gross margin is 70%. Gross margin plays an integral role in SaaS company valuations.

When a company moves from an on-premises data center to the cloud, they expect changes to affect engineering decisions and functionality. After all, their whole way of building and supporting new products has changed. What many companies don’t expect is that the switch to working with cloud providers also necessitates new budgeting and accounting practices.

With containerization, you can write an application once and run it anywhere. Along with portability, containers are also much more resource-efficient than traditional virtual machines (VMs). However, managing containers at scale can be challenging. Besides, many teams find container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes overkill and too complex.

One of the most challenging aspects of running a SaaS business is dealing with highly variable costs. Every service you provide needs resources, and the demands for those resources fluctuate. Just when you think you’ve got this quarter’s budget nailed down, an engineer makes a restructuring decision or a new feature launch exceeds expectations (or falls flat). Suddenly, your bill looks totally different than what you were expecting.