Job Description & Details
This is a serious cloud finance and data engineering hybrid role where you won't just look at dashboards, but actually build the pipelines and guardrails that keep massive AWS and Azure bills under control. If you like untangling messy billing exports and turning them into actionable unit economics that engineering and finance can both agree on, this gig is right up your alley.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
You'll spend your days knee-deep in billing data, designing enterprise-grade tagging taxonomies, and building showback/chargeback models that make engineering teams care about their cloud spend. You'll architect data pipelines using AWS CUR 2.0 and Azure Cost Management exports, writing Python and SQL to process and reconcile terabytes of pricing data. Your core challenge is bridging the communication gap between tight-fisted finance folks and developers who just want to spin up infrastructure without friction.
The Core Tech Stack
You need absolute mastery over AWS and Azure pricing models, billing structures, and commitment strategies like Savings Plans and Reserved Instances. This isn't a high-level strategy position only; you need production-grade SQL and Python skills to handle ETL automation and billing reconciliation, plus Terraform to spin up automated cost guardrails. Familiarity with FOCUS cost data standards and third-party tools like Cloudability or Datadog Cost Management will make or break your day-to-day execution.
Interview Expectations
Expect the hiring manager to throw a complex scenario at you involving unexpected billing anomalies and ask how you would trace the root cause using raw CUR data and Python scripting. They are secretly testing whether you can actually write code to solve data discrepancies or if you just know how to click around in a FinOps dashboard. You'll also likely be grilled on how you plan to enforce tagging governance on a rogue engineering team without completely destroying their deployment velocity.
Application Advice
To get past the ATS, your resume needs to explicitly feature keywords like AWS CUR 2.0, Azure Cost Management, Python, SQL, FOCUS, and Terraform right at the top. Don't just list the tools you've used; quantify the financial impact you've driven in past roles, such as the exact dollar amount or percentage you saved through commitment discount strategies and resource right-sizing.