For cloud bills that stop hiding who spent what
Hire FinOps Engineers
A cloud bill can look manageable right up until an untagged resource or a misconfigured scaling group quietly triples the monthly spend. These engineers are tested on catching that exact blind spot before the invoice does. They are then placed to keep spend attributable and visible as your infrastructure keeps growing.
- Profiles typically within two business days
- Replacement Assurance: If an engineer is not the right fit, a replacement from our own team starts within ten business days of your request, at no extra cost
- You interview before placement if you want to
- At least four hours a day inside your core working hours. Two hours plus a daily written handover for the US West Coast
- 14-Day Risk-Free Trial: For your first engineer on a time-and-materials engagement. Up to 14 calendar days or 80 logged working hours, whichever comes first. End within the trial and pay nothing for trial hours. Continue beyond it and those hours are billed at the agreed rate. Unpaid trial work remains ours if you stop
How we evaluate a FinOps engineer
The tasks, the signals and the onboarding, walked through by the people who run them.
90 secSample frame · video pending01Published, not promised
The assessment behind every engineer we send.
The FinOps bar is published, not assumed: five competencies, the exact task behind each, and the shortcut that ends a candidacy. Most interviews ask about a dashboard tool. This one asks whether untagged spend can happen again after the fix.
What we listen forWhether they design an enforceable standard, not a one-time cleanup.
Forty percent of your cloud spend currently shows up as 'untagged' and nobody can say which team is responsible for it. Propose an approach.
- What strong sounds like
- Designs a tagging standard enforced at resource creation, not just a retroactive cleanup, so untagged spend cannot recur.
- What gives us pause
- Runs a one-time script to backfill tags on existing resources without addressing why new resources keep launching untagged.
AWS Cost Explorer · Azure Cost Management · GCP Billing
Tagging Policies · Cost Allocation Tags · Kubecost
Reserved Instances · Savings Plans · Committed Use Discounts
Anomaly Detection · CloudHealth · Showback Dashboards
02Who you actually meet
The bench, priced by seniority.
Three seniority tiers, priced honestly, and the engineers who fill each one today. Real names and photos take their place as soon as we can share them, and the standard stays exactly the same.
Engineer
Features scoped tightly enough to ship inside your review bar, every time.
The right first hire when your seniors already set the standard.
$2,200–2,900per month
Senior
The hard module nobody else wants to own, taken end to end.
Ownership of a surface, without adding a manager to your headcount.
$3,100–3,900per month
Lead
The workstream's decisions, made daily, so nothing waits on a meeting.
One accountable voice for a pod or initiative that can't afford to drift.
$4,200–5,300per month
FinOps engineer
3 yrs · US East overlap
Built a tagging standard that finally let a shared cloud bill be split accurately across teams
- Cost Allocation
- Tagging Strategy
- AWS Cost Explorer
Senior FinOps engineer
6 yrs · UK + EU hours
Caught a cost anomaly within a day that had gone unnoticed for a full billing cycle before
- Anomaly Detection
- Reserved Capacity
- Showback Design
Lead FinOps architect
9 yrs · EU + US split
Owns the commitment-planning standard balancing cost savings against real reliability needs
- Architecture
- Chargeback Design
- Capacity Forecasting
Indicative ranges, representative profiles. Exact figures and named engineers arrive with your shortlist.
Weighing this against a freelancer, a direct hire or a marketplace? See the honest comparison
03From stated problem to first change
Four steps, each closing on evidence.
This sequence tests judgement about where cost risk actually lives, not familiarity with one billing console. Stopping at any point along the way owes us nothing.
Define the cost problem
We map where your cloud spend is actually unattributed, unmonitored or oversized. The brief names that specific gap, not a list of billing dashboards to know.
A brief your finance lead signsMatch against your cloud bill
Candidates are screened against your actual cloud provider, spend pattern and existing tagging discipline. Three engineers who understand your bill beat thirty who list a certification.
Three fits, not thirty CVsAssess on the real tasks
Your team can watch the tagging-strategy and anomaly-detection exercises directly. What shows up is judgement about real spend, not a rehearsed dashboard tour.
Evaluation you can watchOnboard inside your billing
Access, standards and a first bounded cost fix shipped for real. Continuity cover keeps a departure from leaving spend untracked between hires.
A tagged, monitored account in week one
04Evidence and proof
Engineers who caught the spike before the invoice did.
FinOps proof is a spike caught by an alert, not a chart built after the invoice arrived. Every record here waits for written client approval before production.
Explore case studies
Ten times the intended scale, running for a week before anyone noticed.
Tern's auto-scaling group misfired and ran at ten times its intended size for a week, surfacing only when the monthly invoice arrived. An embedded FinOps engineer built anomaly detection that now flags a spike like that within hours.
- Time to detect a spike
- Hours, not a month
- Untagged spend
- Cut sharply
She built a tagging standard that actually holds, so we finally know which team owns every dollar we spend.
Sample · pending client approval
He talked us out of a reserved-capacity purchase sized on a guess, and the real number was nowhere close.
Sample · pending client approval
05Three shapes, one standard
Add an engineer, a cost pod, or a practice.
Most teams start with one engineer fixing tagging and anomaly detection first. Some need a pod that owns allocation, commitment and showback end to end. Where cost sits inside a wider cloud platform decision, we point you to the practice instead.
- Team extension
One named engineer
A single FinOps specialist inside your direction and your review process. The smallest commitment, and the natural first step.
- Delivery pods
A cost pod
A pod with its own lead that owns tagging, commitment planning and showback end to end. You set priorities while the pod carries delivery.
- Data & Cloud
The practice, not the person
FinOps decisions here sit inside the same practice as cloud architecture, so when platform choices drive the cost, data and cloud engineering takes it on.
06Straight answers
Asked before a FinOps hire is signed.
01What does a FinOps engineer actually do day to day?
Designs tagging standards that hold at scale, builds anomaly detection for unexpected spend, and sizes reserved-capacity commitments against real usage. A good share of the work is making cost visible before the invoice arrives.
02How is this different from hiring a cloud DevOps engineer?
Cloud DevOps centres on provisioning and deployment. This role centres on what that infrastructure costs, who it should be billed to, and whether the spend matches actual usage.
03Can we run our own interviews as well?
Yes, the published tasks are built to be reused directly. Several clients now run the anomaly-detection exercise themselves in later hiring rounds.
04How fast can a FinOps engineer start?
A shortlist arrives within days from a bench evaluated continuously. Actual start speed after that depends on how quickly your side can grant billing and account access.
05Who manages the engineer day to day?
Your finance lead sets cost priorities and signs off on allocation rules. Employment sits with us instead, covering payroll and stepping in with continuity whenever plans shift.
06What if the engineer is not the right fit?
Nothing changes hands financially if you flag a mismatch in the early weeks. The replacement engineer inherits a sharper brief built from exactly what went wrong.
07Do your FinOps engineers use AI tools?
Yes, to draft tagging policies and anomaly-detection rules quickly. The engineer still owns every allocation decision and commitment sized against your actual usage.
08How does pricing work for a hired FinOps engineer?
The published range is meant for planning; your shortlist arrives with the actual figure once scope is settled. Monthly billing, no placement fee, notice-period exit only.