Senior AWS Cloud Cost Optimization Specialist (FinOps)
We are seeking an experienced Senior AWS Cloud Cost Optimization Specialist for our customer to lead initiatives that improve cloud cost efficiency, financial governance, and resource optimization across the AWS environment. This role combines deep AWS technical expertise with FinOps best practices to help engineering teams maximize business value while minimizing unnecessary cloud spend. The ideal candidate has hands-on experience analyzing AWS usage, identifying optimization opportunities, implementing governance controls, and partnering with engineering, DevOps, architecture, and finance teams to drive measurable cost savings without compromising application performance, security, or reliability.
Responsibilities
- Analyze AWS cloud spending and identify opportunities to reduce costs while maintaining operational excellence
- Develop and implement cloud cost optimization strategies across compute, storage, networking, databases, and managed services
- Build dashboards and reports to provide visibility into cloud consumption, trends, forecasting, and savings opportunities
- Establish cloud cost governance policies, tagging standards, and chargeback/showback models
- Optimize EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, DynamoDB, CloudFront, and other AWS services for cost and performance
- Evaluate and recommend Reserved Instances (RIs), Savings Plans, and Spot Instances where appropriate
- Identify and eliminate idle, underutilized, or orphaned cloud resources
- Collaborate with engineering teams to incorporate cost optimization into solution architecture and application design
- Partner with DevOps teams to automate cost optimization using Infrastructure as Code and policy enforcement
- Monitor cloud budgets, cost anomalies, and utilization trends using AWS native and third-party tools
- Present cost optimization recommendations, savings opportunities, and executive reports to technical and business stakeholders
- Promote FinOps best practices across engineering teams
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Finance, or equivalent practical experience
- 5+ years of hands-on experience managing AWS cloud environments and optimizing costs in enterprise settings
- Understanding of AWS pricing models and billing
- Proficiency in AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR), along with Cost Anomaly Detection
- Knowledge of Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Spot Instances, and storage lifecycle optimization
- Skills in Terraform or CloudFormation
- Strong analytical skills with the ability to interpret large datasets and identify optimization opportunities
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills
- English proficiency at B2 level or higher
Nice to have
- Background in implementing FinOps frameworks and cloud financial management practices
- Familiarity with CloudHealth, Apptio Cloudability, Flexera, or ProsperOps
- Experience with AWS Organizations and multi-account governance
- Knowledge of Kubernetes (EKS) cost optimization and serverless architecture optimization
- Proficiency in Python, SQL, QuickSight, Power BI, or Tableau for reporting and automation
- Experience working in Agile environments
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate or Professional, AWS Certified Developer – Associate, AWS Certified SysOps Administrator, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional
- FinOps Certified Practitioner (FOCP) or FinOps Certified Professional
