Senior Engineer – Cloud Finops

AHEAD is seeking a Senior Engineer - AWS to drive cloud cost efficiency, automation, and governance across multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, and GCP). This role is central to strengthening cost visibility, accountability, and optimization, while embedding automation and DevOps best practices across major public cloud platforms. The Senior Engineer will partner with cloud engineering and finance stakeholders to standardize tagging, build cost dashboards, develop automated workflows, and advance FinOps as a Service - integrating cloud cost management, CI/CD automation, and cost tracking to achieve operational excellence and financial transparency. As a Senior Engineer, you will bring deep, hands-on experience across open-source, enterprise, and cloud technologies, combined with a proven record of delivery. You are expected to lead engagements, demonstrate strong commercial awareness, and communicate maturely with stakeholders at all levels. You will design, develop, and deploy integration solutions with third-party tools, and will work directly with customer service owners, process owners, and delivery teams across engagements, demonstrations, and meetings. This role carries an expectation of occasional travel and after-hours/weekend support during major incidents, client change windows, or similar events.

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.