Matan Ben-Ishay of Credit Karma Talks Building a Cost-Aware Engineering Culture
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
Quote of the Show:
“ By not calling it FinOps, we're basically saying every engineer is expected to do FinOps. ” - Matan Ben-Ishay
Links:
Website: https://www.creditkarma.com/
In this episode of FinOps in Action, Matan Ben-Ishay of Credit Karma shares how to build a cost-aware engineering culture by balancing developer velocity with cloud governance and aligning finance and engineering. From strategic GCP commitments to creating non-blocking guardrails, Matan offers practical insights for scaling FinOps in fast-moving organizations.