FinOps Lead (AWS)

Role Overview

As a Senior FinOps Engineer, you will lead the cost management strategy for our multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure. You will be responsible for balancing technical performance with financial efficiency, ensuring our AWS environment scales profitably. This is a high-impact role at the intersection of DevOps, Engineering, and Finance.

Key Responsibilities

1. AWS Cost Management & Optimization

• Commitment Strategy: Evaluate, purchase, and manage the lifecycle of Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instances to achieve a target of 20-30% in savings.
• Monitoring: Perform daily monitoring of AWS spending via Cost Explorer and custom reporting.
• Anomaly Detection: Rapidly identify and investigate cost spikes or unexpected usage patterns.
• Waste Elimination: Drive "Right-sizing" initiatives and eliminate idle resources (zombie EBS, snapshots, unutilized Load Balancers).
• Storage Optimization: Implement and audit Lifecycle policies for S3, snapshots, and logs.

2. Strategic SaaS Financial Operations

• Cost Allocation & Tagging: Develop and enforce a rigorous tagging strategy to enable unit economics (Cost per Client/Tenant).
• Chargeback/Showback: Build and maintain automated chargeback models to distribute costs accurately across clients.
• Forecasting: Build 3-6-12 month financial forecasts and perform Variance Analysis (Budget vs. Actual).
• Reconciliation: Perform monthly billing reconciliation between AWS infrastructure costs and client revenue.

3. Automation & Collaboration

• Tooling: Automate reporting using AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) and integrate data with BI tools (Tableau, PowerBI, or Looker).
• Governance: Act as a core member of architectural reviews to assess the cost impact of new features or infrastructure changes.
• Education: Lead weekly cost reviews with DevOps/Product teams and promote a "Cost-Aware" engineering culture.

Requirements

Must Have:

• 2+ years of hands-on AWS experience with deep knowledge of pricing models (EC2, RDS, S3, CloudFront, Lambda).
• Proven track record managing AWS environments with $50K+ monthly spend.
• Expertise in AWS Billing Tools: Cost Explorer, CUR, AWS Budgets, and AWS Organizations.
• Data Proficiency: Strong SQL and Advanced Excel skills.
• FinOps Mindset: Solid understanding of the FinOps Framework and SaaS multi-tenant challenges.
• English: Upper-Intermediate or higher (for technical documentation and collaboration).

Nice to Have:

• Certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect or FinOps Certified Practitioner.
• Technical Skills: Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation) and scripting (Python/Bash).
• Third-party Tools: Experience with CloudHealth, CloudCheckr, or Apptio Cloudability.
• Multi-cloud: Familiarity with Azure or GCP cost management.

What We Offer

• Opportunity to build a FinOps practice from the ground up for a scaling SaaS product.
• A cross-functional role with exposure to both deep-tech and executive-level business strategy.