Senior Cloud FinOps Engineer - Apex Systems

 
 
Apex Systems is currently seeking a Senior Cloud FinOps Engineer for one of our top  Financial Services clients in St. Paul, MN. 
 
Please see below for details about this exciting growth opportunity, and apply now!
 
JOB DESCRIPTION - Senior Cloud Engineer FinOps
Overview: 
Our client is seeking a Senior Cloud Engineer to join the Enterprise Cloud and Development Platform team with a focus on FinOps engineering as well as supporting other capabilities for our internal engineering and app development-oriented customers. This role is part of the Enterprise Cloud and Development Platforms organization within the Enterprise Technology division. We provide offerings including: FinOps, application hosting, deployment, and observability, CI/CD pipelines, API management, local desktop development, and our clients AWS cloud. Our mission includes: 
 
The Cloud Engineer will be part of the team responsible for our clients FinOps engineering, application hosting, observability, and API management technologies and services. You will help design, engineer, improve, and maintain these capabilities in alignment with our enterprise goals and plans, operating safely, securely, and effectively through automation, self-service, and optimization. Cloud Engineers also provide consulting and education on our capabilities for engineers, developers, architects, and leaders throughout Enterprise Technology as well as our Governance, Risk, and Compliance teams.  
One of our most recently developed capabilities FinOps, was established as part of our clients Cloud Program to enhance the business value derived from the clients cloud infrastructure. While our Cloud migration is largely complete, the next phase focuses on empowering teams to make well-informed decisions regarding cloud expenditure. This involves establishing KPIs and cloud usage goals aligned with optimization and resilience in collaboration with business functions and goals. 
The FinOps capability plays a crucial role in guiding and ensuring financial accountability for the clients cloud environments. This capability and this position will provide scalable solutions that enable applications to optimize cloud performance. This ensures decision-making is informed by the expertise of the Enterprise Cloud and Development Platform team, with implementation carried out by our engineers and software development teams. 
Responsibilities include but not limited to: 
FinOps Engineering
 
API Management/Observability/App Hosting
 
What we would expect from you: 
 
Physical job requirements:
The physical job requirements described above are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of jobs.
 

• Building and establishing TCO (Total Cost of ownership to increase visibility into the interconnectedness between applications and infrastructure via engineered solution(s).
• Promoting practices and behaviors around engineering excellence, FinOps, DevOps, automation/infrastructure as code, optimization, and modernization  
• Providing education, consulting, and collaborative engagement with other teams throughout Enterprise Technology
• Ensuring our solutions are designed, engineered, and operate safely, securely, and effectively
• Creating dynamic and scalable solutions through automation, infrastructure as code, and self-service capabilities
• Leveraging a customer-centric mindset towards providing high-quality offerings for engineers and developers throughout the enterprise 
• Reserved Instances/Savings Plans: Automatically analyze usage patterns and recommend or purchase reserved instances or savings plans where beneficial working with finance professionals to procure.
• Foster partnerships with engineers and architects to drive cloud optimization initiatives. Encourage cross-functional collaboration to implement cost-effective architectural patterns, review resource usage patterns, and iterate on optimization strategies. 
• Collaborate with finance, technology, and business teams to mature FinOps governance processes including embedding FinOps functions into existing governance and architectural review processes. This includes incorporating cost optimization reviews as part of code reviews, integrating cost reporting into dashboards used by engineering teams, and setting up alerts for cost thresholds. 
• Develop and maintain chargeback mappings and tagging strategies for cloud resources through Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
• Implement automated anomaly detection using tools like AWS Cost Anomaly Detection or custom scripts that analyze cost and usage trends across accounts, teams, and environments and integrate automated tools to recommend optimal instance sizes based upon usage patterns.
• Utilize CI/CD pipelines to automate the deployment of cloud cost monitoring tools and scripts (e.g., Cloudability, AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management). Ensure these tools are integrated to provide continuous visibility into trends and their alignment with business goals and KPIs. Then using these goals and KPI’s, develop scripts or use cloud-native tools to enforce compliance with policies (e.g., unused resources cleanup, adherence to budgeting rules). 
• Participate in an on-call rotation for troubleshooting incidents, identifying root causes, fixing problems, documenting and communicating changes, and implementing preventive measures.  
• Seek feedback from engineers and developers on the quality and experience of our capabilities, use the feedback towards improvements and future feature releases.  
• Define, document, and share best practices, guardrails, standards, and guidelines for our capabilities.  
• Identify, analyze, and mitigate vulnerabilities, leveraging automation and modernization to minimize or tackle technical debt.  
• Provide consulting and education on our capabilities for other engineers, developers, architects, and leadership throughout Enterprise Technology.  
• Collaborate and partner with other technology teams, cybersecurity, and governance/risk/compliance teams to ensure capabilities continue to meet requirements throughout their lifecycle. 
• Create innovative solutions leveraging automation and self-service capabilities, focusing on providing a good experience for our internal engineers and developers while meeting requirements for operating safely, securely, and effectively.  
• Design, engineer, and support solutions for our clients application hosting, API management, observability, and portions of our AWS and Azure cloud environments. 
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills with attention to detail and accuracy and comfort with a wide variety of personas (technology associates, business representatives, finance partners, engineers, data scientists, leadership etc.) 
• Willingness to learn other platforms and tooling capabilities to provide information to application owners on financial and architectural cloud optimization opportunities, as well as monitoring and observability best practices
• FinOps Engineering or Software Engineering experience with significant cost optimization projects
• Familiarity with Cloud service pricing models, cost and usage estimates and forecast modeling using AWS or Azure tooling or third-party tooling such as Cloudability or Harness.  
• Ability to work both independently and collaboratively as part of a team, adapt to changes in priorities according to business needs, and prioritize tasks to meet deadlines. 
• Experience leveraging infrastructure as code to create and manage solutions in AWS, including Python, CloudFormation, Terraform, etc.   
• Experience with AWS or Azure cloud services (preferably 4 years +), practical cloud deployment experience in AWS Cloud services including EKS, EC2, and/or experimentation with some AI/ML services 
• Ability to perform simple grasping including handwriting, paper manipulation, sorting, folding, etc. periodically throughout entire workday.
• Ability to utilize telephone for approximately 1-4 hours per day.
• Ability to utilize keyboard, mouse and computer for up to 8 hours per day.
• Ability to work at least 40 hours per week.