Do you love working on AWS bills? Helping build cost management processes? If so, you might be a great fit for our team.

We’re looking to augment our team with AWS specialists who are looking for part-time freelance/contract work. This is not a full-time W2 role.

You will be responsible for helping our clients understand and optimize their AWS spend. You will be working on identifying cost reduction opportunities at an architectural level, building cost forecasting models, creating better governance and cost management controls, assessing clients own cost management programs, and continuing to identify better ways we can serve our clients.

You will be working closely with executives and engineers from our clients and leading projects on some of the largest, most complicated AWS environments you can imagine. Your skills in communicating to both executive audiences and engineering audiences will be crucial in this role. It’s not uncommon for us to find ourselves on a call with a CFO of a billion dollar company followed by a call with one of their SREs to discuss some esoteric Kafka architecture.

We’re looking for folks from an Engineering/SRE/DevOps background for this role, not a finance or business background. Your skills in systems architecture will be invaluable, but you won’t have the headache and responsibility of running production systems, nor do we do any engineering-level implementation for our clients. All of our work is advisory in nature, with typical engagements lasting up to 12 weeks at the high end (most are 6-8 weeks).

Our clients expect us to be deeply engaged experts in AWS, particularly in AWS billing, so you’ll need to do your best to constantly improve your skills in the wild west that is Amazon Web Services. Nobody has this all in their head; it’s a process that never ends.

What’s in it for you? Working at The Duckbill Group is a great way to get an incredible amount of experience across a wide range of environments in a very short amount of time. While most people work with one AWS environment every two years or so, we see dozens each year--including some of the largest and most interesting AWS customers out there. We promise you: no matter how much experience you have with AWS now, you’ll learn more with us than you thought possible.

Responsibilities

• We’re a small, scrappy company. You’ll be working with a high degree of autonomy, often running engagements by yourself.
• Communicate across multiple teams at our clients, from Engineering to Finance, and up to C-suite staff. You’ll be working with clients via email, Slack, and video calls.
• Work directly with clients to help them understand their AWS spend and optimize it based on their unique architecture and desired business outcomes
• Keep up to date on the latest AWS news and changes and continually work at being an expert in all-things-AWS
• You love taking a data-driven approach to cost management. Rather than make guesses about costs, you dive deep for answers. (In a love triangle with Excel and Python? Yeah, us too.)

Requirements

• Strong with AWS concepts, tools, and services.
• Prior experience communicating effectively with executive audiences
• Prior experience in AWS cost management
• Prior experience working in a consultative, client-facing role. Seriously, you’ve got to love consulting and working with clients.
• This role is remote, but you must be US-based and legally authorized to work in the United States due to various client requirements we have.

Compensation & Benefits

We pay our cost management contractors $250 per hour, though we’re open to negotiating a fixed price per engagement. As this is a contractor role, the role is not eligible for company benefits.

About Us

The Duckbill Group provides consulting services to mid-market and enterprise companies aimed at optimizing and managing their AWS spend. You can read about our services and some of our clients on our website. Additionally, we operate several media publications in the AWS space, including our flagship publication, Last Week in AWS.

While we might look like a standard boutique consulting firm, we’ve got big dreams and ambitions around how we can serve more clients in more ways.

We believe in a different way of doing consulting:

• We believe protecting the client is paramount.
• We don't bill hourly or percent-of-savings, because both create misalignment between us and our clients.
• We optimize for short, in-and-out engagements over long-term engagements. Our average client engagement lasts only eight weeks.
• We don't do engineering-level implementation work. We stick to higher-level engagements where our value is clear to everyone.
• We don't do custom engagements. Our consulting services look more like a product than a service, in that they are fixed-scope, defined-outcome, defined-process, and standardized pricing. In other words, no scope creep here.

We are not venture-funded and have no intention of becoming so. We’re financed instead by the magic of revenue and profitability. 

We are a fully remote company. We’re a company of five employees currently and just over five years old.

Diversity & Inclusion

We’re building a diverse and inclusive workplace where we learn from each other. We hire adults. We value transparency, autonomy, experimentation, and kind, direct feedback. We welcome nontraditional candidates, and people of all backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. We’re an equal opportunity employer and our hiring process is structured to put you at ease and help you demonstrate your best work. If we are doing a poor job of this at any time, please let us know. We hire for strengths, not absence of weakness. Come do great things with us.

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