Senior Engineer – AWS (FinOps)

Key Responsibilities

Cost Visibility & Allocation

• Maintain and enhance cost allocation and chargeback models, budgets, and cost alerts across cloud accounts.
• Implement and enforce tagging and resource-hierarchy standards, ensuring greater than 90% coverage for cost-critical tags (app, environment, owner, cost center).
• Develop and publish cost-visibility dashboards and reports using Power BI, native cloud tooling, or third-party FinOps platforms.
• Support unified multi-cloud cost reporting to ensure transparency for engineering and finance teams.

Optimization & Engineering

• Execute rightsizing and scheduling of cloud resources across AWS and Azure (EC2, RDS, S3, VMs, App Services, Storage, Networking).
• Manage and optimize Reservations (RIs), Savings Plans, and Hybrid Benefits (AWS BYOL / Azure Hybrid Benefit).
• Assist in implementing policy-as-code using AWS Config, Azure Policy, Terraform, or Bicep, under senior guidance.
• Participate in anomaly detection, spend forecasting, and automated remediation workflows.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipeline management, infrastructure automation, and GitOps practices using GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps.

Operate & Partner

• Provide actionable input during monthly cost and performance reviews with product and engineering stakeholders.
• Partner with Finance and Procurement teams on budgeting, forecasting, and billing validation.
• Collaborate with SRE and Platform teams to balance cost efficiency, reliability, and security.
• Maintain operational hygiene through scripting, tagging audits, and compliance automation.

Core Technology Stack

Cost & Governance

• AWS: Cost Explorer, Budgets, Config, Organizations, Management Groups.
• Azure: Cost Management + Billing, Advisor, Policy.
• GCP: Billing Reports.
• FinOps Platforms: Apptio Cloudability, CloudHealth, Kubecost, Harness CCM.

Observability & Data

• AWS CloudWatch.
• Azure Monitor and Log Analytics.
• Power BI.
• Amazon QuickSight.

Infrastructure as Code & Automation

• Terraform, Bicep, AWS CloudFormation, Ansible.
• Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, GitLab.
• AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, PowerShell, Python.

Cloud Services Exposure

• AWS: EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, EKS (basics), CloudTrail, CloudWatch.
• Azure: VMs, App Services, Storage, Azure SQL, AKS, Databricks (basics).
• GCP: Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, Cloud Functions, GKE.

Nice-to-Have Tools

• Apptio Cloudability, VMware Aria/CloudHealth, Kubecost, custom FinOps dashboards.

Qualifications

● Minimum 5+ years in a customer-facing technical role.
● Minimum 3+ years designing, securing, and deploying large-scale cloud applications and solutions.
● Experience in Cloud Engineering, Platform Operations, DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), including 1–2 years of FinOps or cloud cost optimization (AWS preferred).
● Strong experience with AWS and Azure cost management, including tagging, cost allocation, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting.
● Knowledge of Reserved Instances (RIs), Savings Plans, rightsizing, utilization optimization, and cloud cost governance.
● Experience with Power BI, Kusto Query Language (KQL), Amazon CloudWatch, Python, and PowerShell.
● Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Azure Bicep).
● Strong understanding of CI/CD pipelines, DevOps, and infrastructure automation.
● Architect-level development skills in Python, PowerShell, Java, or similar programming languages.
● Subject Matter Expert (SME) in at least one cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform).
● Strong networking knowledge, including VPCs/VNets, Subnets, Route Tables, Security Groups/NSGs, Load Balancers, VPNs, Network Connectivity, and Routing.
● Strong Terraform development and modular infrastructure design experience.
● Experience with AWS services including Lambda, API Gateway, ECS, EKS, and other AWS native services.
● Experience with multi-account AWS environments including AWS Organizations, Control Tower, Service Control Policies (SCPs), Landing Zones, Account Vending, Baseline Configurations, and Guardrails.
● Experience with DevOps platforms including Bitbucket (preferred), GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps Pipelines, and GitLab CI/CD.
● Experience with security and governance tools including Cloud Custodian, Trivy, SAST/DAST tools, Pre-commit Hooks, and other DevSecOps tools.
● Experience with Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and remediation workflows.
● Experience with secrets management solutions including AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault, or equivalent.
● Experience with monitoring and observability tools including Amazon CloudWatch, Datadog, Grafana, or similar platforms.
● Experience with container security and image scanning for Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS.
● Experience working in regulated environments including HIPAA, SOC 2, HITRUST, or equivalent compliance frameworks.
● Understanding of cloud data governance, data classification, and data protection.
● Experience implementing cloud compliance, audit controls, and governance standards.
● Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills with attention to detail.
● Strong project management, organizational, and communication skills.
● Self-motivated, well-organized, able to manage multiple priorities, and willing to travel as required.

Performance Expectations

Top Expectations for a Senior Engineer

● Execute tagging, cost optimization, and reporting activities under senior guidance.
● Maintain accurate dashboards and deliver actionable insights to stakeholders.
● Assist in implementing policy-as-code, automation scripts, and cost-saving recommendations.
● Increase cost awareness among engineering teams and help embed FinOps principles.
● Create and maintain standard operating procedures and playbooks for recurring tasks.
● Demonstrate proven skills across multiple billable technologies, validated through certification, training, or demonstrated ability.
● Serve as a recognized subject-matter expert within your professional discipline.
● Contribute to more complex and critical environments, often exceeding the expectations of your current job title.

Lead vs. Contribute

● Participate in and help lead a team of technical delivery resources across skill sets to achieve customer business and technology goals.
● Participate in and lead written deliverable creation across areas of expertise.
● Provide measurable input into AHEAD's products, processes, standards, and plans.
● Provide time estimates for work based on available information.
● Coordinate and contribute to cross-practice deliverables using current templates.
● Act as a self-starter in identifying work during non-scheduled hours; prioritize and complete tasks independently, on time or ahead of schedule.
● Lead development and testing activities; contribute to refining methodology and best practices.
● Initiate and participate in authoring PCR requests when additional work is requested.

Architect Skills

● Demonstrate depth and expertise across at least one core technology.
● Architect and lead the deployment of moderately complex cloud solutions.
● Understand the performance, scaling, and functional characteristics of software technologies.
● Understand open-source and cloud use cases and recommend standard design patterns and best practices.

Certifications and Goals

● Maintain several relevant, higher-level certifications.
● Consistently meet goal objectives and exceed select goals.

Communication (Verbal and Written)

● Communicate with external customers, including senior management, on matters requiring explanation, interpretation, or advisement.
● Consistently meet or exceed customer expectations for communication and commitments.
● Work effectively with outside vendors on internal or customer-related issues.
● Participate in pre-sales activities, including scoping, positioning, and technology adoption/maturation.
● Identify new client opportunities within the POD and communicate them to leadership, including the Team Lead.
● Help customer leadership set strategic direction beyond tactics and technology.
● Write and lead complex deliverables within the practice; translate customer requirements into technical requirements.

Leadership and Influence

● Works to influence direct team members, broader internal team, and external customers, to agree and accept new concepts, best practices, and approaches.
● Advises and trains more junior staff via mentorship while helping to drive the entire AHEAD platform.
● A reliable resource for marketing on thought leadership pieces for their practice for AHEAD and our customers.
● Has started speaking at industry conferences and/or webinars.
● Contributes to more complex workshops and understands how their area of expertise fits into our stitching message.
● Accepts responsibility for own actions and sometimes those of others as part of a team.
● Works well with immediate, extend and external teams, a true team player.
● Consistently meets expectations in terms of customer facing, writing, presentation and problem-solving skills and requires little to no supervision in this area.
● Consistently exhibits a positive attitude towards AHEAD and its customers.
● Willing to go the extra mile when asked to do so (i.e., time outside of normal working hours to support a customer initiative, production roll-out, could also be > 40 hours for short intervals).
● Consistently pursues self-development and drives the AHEAD business model for self and sometimes others on the team.
● Highly respected by peers and sales team.

Culture

● Support initiatives beyond your immediate area of responsibility.
● Encourage cross-team interaction.
● Motivate others to think creatively.
● Achieve success through others.