FinOps Engineer (AWS)

Cost Visibility & Reporting

• Analyse AWS spend across multiple accounts, identifying cost drivers and mapping them to products, portfolios, and engineering teams.

• Produce regular, accurate cost reports for senior management, clearly articulating budget impact, variance, and trend analysis.

• Maintain and improve tagging hygiene and allocation models to ensure costs are attributed correctly and consistently.

• Track and report the status of active savings initiatives and projects, providing a clear view of projected vs. realised savings.

AWS Cost Optimisation

• Lead and execute optimisation initiatives across the AWS estate, with deep practical knowledge of:

• EC2 and EBS rightsizing — matching instance types and storage configurations to actual workload patterns, including gp2-to-gp3 migrations and IOPS/throughput tuning.

• Scheduling and auto-scaling — eliminating 24/7 on-demand running for non-production workloads.

• Commitment-based savings — managing Reserved Instances (Standard and Convertible), Compute and EC2 Savings Plans, including coverage and utilisation tracking.

• Data transfer cost reduction — identifying and remediating avoidable inter-AZ, internet egress, and NAT Gateway charges.

• Storage and snapshot lifecycle — enforcing retention policies and tiering to reduce EBS, S3, and snapshot costs.

• Understand and advise on AWS commercial programmes, including MAP (Migration Acceleration Programme), PPAs (Private Pricing Agreements), and EDP (Enterprise Discount Programme) to maximise negotiated savings.

Stakeholder Enablement & FinOps Culture

• Act as a trusted advisor to engineering and product teams, helping them identify cost 'hot spots', understand the drivers behind their spend, and develop a sense of ownership over cloud costs.

• Support and coordinate a network of FinOps Champions embedded across product and portfolio areas — providing them with tooling, education, data, and frameworks to drive cost accountability locally.

• Produce self-service dashboards and cost reporting assets that allow teams to monitor their own spend without requiring FinOps intervention for every query.

• Communicate cost findings and recommendations clearly and concisely in both written and verbal formats, tailored to a non-technical or management audience where appropriate.

Governance & Autonomy

• Proactively review cloud spend and independently develop proposals for cost reduction and control initiatives — not waiting to be asked.

• Maintain initiative trackers and savings registers, providing accurate status updates to management on in-flight projects across multiple AWS accounts and product areas.

• Contribute to FinOps policies, standards, and best practice documentation to scale knowledge across the organisation.

Essential

• 3–6 years of hands-on FinOps, cloud cost management, or cloud operations experience, with a strong focus on AWS.

• Proven ability to independently investigate AWS cost drivers and produce clear, management-ready reports with business context.

• Deep practical knowledge of AWS cost optimisation levers: EC2 rightsizing, EBS (including gp3 IOPS/throughput tuning), scheduling, Savings Plans, and Reserved Instances.

• Solid understanding of AWS data transfer pricing models and strategies to reduce inter-AZ, internet egress, and NAT Gateway costs.

• Experience managing or tracking savings initiatives across multiple AWS accounts or teams simultaneously.

• Familiarity with AWS native cost tooling: Cost Explorer, Cost and Usage Reports (CUR), AWS Budgets, and Trusted Advisor.

• Strong communication skills — able to translate technical findings into business language for a senior management audience.

• Demonstrated ability to work autonomously, prioritise competing demands, and deliver without close supervision.

Highly Desirable

• Experience with AWS commercial programmes: MAP, PPA, and/or EDP, including modelling commitments and tracking credit utilisation.

• Experience supporting or coaching engineering teams with limited cloud cost knowledge — building capability, not just delivering reports.

• Familiarity with third-party FinOps platforms (e.g. CloudHealth, Apptio Cloudability, AWS Cost Intelligence Dashboard).

• FinOps Certified Practitioner (FOCP) certification from the FinOps Foundation, or active progress towards it.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Terraform, CloudFormation) sufficient to understand resource configurations and their cost implications.

• SQL or Python scripting for CUR data analysis and custom reporting.