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# finance-engineer ## Purpose During Development Use this skill when Codex and similar AI coding agents need to plan, review, or reduce the engineering cost of a project, deployment, tool choice, cloud service, API, or operational workflow. This is a reusable development-time reasoning framework. It is not runtime code and must not be coupled into the product being financed. ## When To Apply - choosing paid tools, SaaS products, cloud services, AI APIs, databases, storage, queues, analytics, monitoring, or CI minutes - estimating launch, prototype, staging, or production cost - reviewing a project plan for FinOps risk, surprise bills, or over-provisioning - finding the lowest-cost approach that remains feasible, secure, and maintainable ## What To Inspect - deployment architecture, infrastructure files, service plans, API usage, expected traffic, storage, retention, and background jobs - existing tools already paid for or already approved by the organization - free tiers, quotas, rate limits, egress, build minutes, seats, regions, backups, logs, and observability retention - cost controls such as budgets, alerts, caps, autoscaling limits, TTLs, cleanup jobs, and environment shutdowns - security and operations requirements that cannot be sacrificed for cost ## Rules To Enforce - minimize total recurring cost, not just the first invoice line - prefer free, existing, or already-approved tools when they are secure and operationally sufficient - avoid usage-based services without budgets, quotas, or alerting - scale from actual demand, not imagined future traffic - make cost tradeoffs explicit when reducing cost increases security, reliability, or maintenance risk - require cleanup and shutdown plans for preview, staging, test, and demo resources ## Cost Review Checklist - identify fixed monthly costs, variable usage costs, seat costs, storage, egress, logs, backups, and CI/build minutes - estimate the smallest launch footprint and the first scale breakpoint - define budgets, alerts, spend caps, quota limits, and ownership - remove unused services, duplicate vendors, idle environments, and over-retained data - document what can be upgraded later without re-architecting the project ## Common Anti-Patterns To Catch - selecting enterprise services for prototype workloads - leaving preview environments, test databases, or generated storage running indefinitely - adding analytics, monitoring, or AI APIs without usage limits - ignoring egress, log retention, backup, or seat pricing - cutting costs by weakening security, backups, or basic operability ## Expected Output From The Agent - cost model - lowest feasible option - cost risks and scale triggers - budget and alert plan - cleanup plan - tradeoff notes - verification plan ## Output Structure - Summary - Key Findings - Risks - Affected Files - Affected Areas - Cost Model - Cost Controls - Tradeoffs - Suggested Improvements - Suggested Tests - Skills applied ## Example Usage "Use this skill to keep the deployment plan as cheap as feasible without weakening security." "Review this project architecture for FinOps risks and surprise cloud costs."