Building a Cost-Aware Engineering Culture ft. Matan Ben-Ishay, Credit Karma | Ep 28

FinOps isn’t just about tools—it’s about culture, structure, and long-term trust.

In this episode of FinOps in Action, I sat down with Matan Ben-Ishay, FP&A, Engineering at Credit Karma, to explore what it really takes to build a cost-aware engineering culture and scale FinOps sustainably across an organization.

Matan shares his approach to balancing developer velocity with cloud governance, managing GCP commitments strategically, and why FinOps can’t live only in finance or engineering—it needs both.

We discuss:

• Why trust and education are more effective than top-down controls

• How Credit Karma built guardrails without blocking dev teams

• The difference between tactical waste and structural waste

• How to handle long-term cloud commitments in a fast-moving org

• What happens when FinOps sits under finance vs. under engineering

🎧 Subscribe for more FinOps leadership conversations → https://finopsinaction.substack.com/

 Quote of the Show:

• “ By not calling it FinOps, we're basically saying every engineer is expected to do FinOps. ” - Matan Ben-Ishay

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matan-ben-ishay/ 
• Website: https://www.creditkarma.com/ 

Ways to Tune In:

• Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/f25a9d18-c12f-4ee4-93f5-2aa96e509b55 
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/finops-in-action/id1790497808 
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• Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/finops-in-action-5958339 
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IpjMc3qxDXZAjic5Zq21t 
• Substack: https://finopsinaction.substack.com/ 
• Transistor: finopsinaction.com 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PointFiveCloudCostEfficiency