Director, Engineering Optimization

MasterControl; Salt Lake City (UT); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

MasterControl is seeking a Director of Engineering Optimization to lead cloud FinOps and reliability initiatives for our growth-focused cloud infrastructure. You will drive cost governance, build dashboards, and align engineering decisions with financial outcomes to optimize scale and performance.

You will partner with Engineering, Product, and Finance to define KPIs, implement SLOs/SLIs, and ensure durable, cost-efficient cloud architectures across AWS and Azure.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in SRE/DevOps/Cloud/Platform Eng roles.
• 3+ years FinOps experience.
• Strong SaaS infra architecture knowledge.
• Ability to translate infra decisions into financial impact.
• AWS and Azure expertise.
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform/CloudFormation/Bicep.
• Scripting: Python/Bash/Go.
• Kubernetes administration and security.

Responsibilities

• Lead FinOps across AWS and Azure with cost visibility and optimization.
• Own cloud cost governance end-to-end, including tagging, budgeting, and chargeback reporting.
• Build real-time dashboards for Engineering, Finance, and Leadership on cloud spend and trends.
• Develop unit economics models tying costs to usage metrics.
• Identify cost-saving opportunities across RI, Savings Plans, Spot usage, and right-sizing.
• Evaluate service utilization and provide actionable recommendations.
• Define and track cloud spend KPIs across engineering and SRE teams.
• Define, implement, and manage SLOs/SLIs and error budgets.
• Lead incident response, postmortems, and root cause analyses.
• Design observability solutions for full-stack visibility.
• Champion automation to reduce toil and speed deployments.
• Embed reliability and cost-awareness into SDLC and CI/CD pipelines.

Skills

SRE/DevOps

Cloud Engineering

Platform Engineering

FinOps

AWS

Azure

Terraform

CI/CD

Python

Kubernetes

Tools

CloudFormation

Bicep

Job description

MasterControl Inc. is a leading cloud-based quality and compliance software provider for life sciences and other regulated industries. Our mission is to enable our customers to bring life-changing products to market faster while ensuring compliance and quality throughout the product lifecycle. We are committed to innovation, customer success, and making a positive impact on the world.

Summary

The Director of Engineering Optimization is a key technical leadership role that ensures the company’s growing cloud infrastructure is resilient, scalable, and performant, while remaining fiscally responsible and aligned with business growth. If you possess the qualifications and experience, we encourage you to apply for this exciting opportunity.

Responsibilities

• Lead cloud financial operations (FinOps) practices across AWS and Azure, driving cost visibility, accountability, and continuous optimization
• Own and manage cloud cost governance end-to-end — including policy enforcement, tagging standards, budgeting frameworks, and chargeback/showback reporting
• Build and maintain real-time dashboards and reporting tools that give Engineering, Finance, and Leadership clear insight into cloud spend, trends, and anomalies
• Develop and maintain unit economics models that tie infrastructure costs directly to customer and product usage metrics
• Identify and execute cost-saving opportunities across Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Spot/Preemptible usage, right-sizing, and waste elimination
• Evaluate AWS and Azure service utilization and deliver actionable recommendations aligned to business outcomes
• Define and track cloud spend KPIs, ensuring financial accountability is embedded across all engineering teams and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Define, implement, and manage SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets across critical services and platforms
• Lead incident response, blameless postmortems, and root cause analysis to drive measurable, continuous improvement
• Design and maintain comprehensive observability solutions — including metrics, logging, distributed tracing, and alerting — to ensure full-stack visibility
• Champion automation to eliminate toil, accelerate deployment velocity, and improve system reliability at scale
• Embed reliability and cost-awareness into the SDLC and CI/CD pipelines in partnership with the development teams
• Architect, manage, and optimize workloads across core AWS services, including:
  • EKS – Kubernetes cluster lifecycle, autoscaling, node optimization, and Helm-based deployments
  • ECS – Task definition management, Fargate vs. EC2 launch type optimization, and service scaling
  • Lambda – Serverless function governance, cold start optimization, and cost-per-invocation analysis
  • RDS / Aurora – Instance sizing, Multi-AZ configurations, read replica strategies, performance tuning, and backup/DR management
  • SQL Server on RDS/EC2 – Licensing optimization (BYOL vs. License Included), performance monitoring, and patching strategies
  • EC2 – Fleet management, Auto Scaling Groups, AMI lifecycle management, and instance type optimization
• Support and optimize Azure workloads in alignment with AWS environments and broader cloud strategy
• Manage and govern AKS, Azure SQL, App Services, and Azure Monitor/Cost Management tooling
• Drive cross-cloud governance, policy enforcement, and unified tagging strategies to ensure consistency and accountability across both platforms

Collaboration & Technical Leadership

• Serve as a technical mentor and subject matter expert for junior and mid-level engineers, elevating the team's FinOps and SRE capabilities
• Contribute to architecture reviews and technical roadmaps with a reliability-first and cost-conscious lens
• Partner with Engineering, Product, and Finance stakeholders to align infrastructure decisions with business priorities and financial goals
• Produce and maintain clear documentation, runbooks, and operational playbooks to support operational excellence

Basic Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, Cloud Engineering, or Platform Engineering roles
• 3+ years of hands‑on FinOps experience managing cloud cost optimization at scale
• Strong understanding of SaaS infrastructure architecture and customer provisioning models
• Ability to translate technical infrastructure decisions into financial impact
• Comfortable partnering across Engineering, Finance, and Operations
• Deep expertise with AWS (EKS, ECS, Lambda, RDS, Aurora, SQL Server, EC2)
• Working knowledge of Azure infrastructure and cost management tooling
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, and/or Bicep)
• Strong scripting and automation skills (Python, Bash, Go, or similar)
• Experience with Kubernetes administration, Helm, and container security best practices
• Familiarity with observability platforms (Datadog, Grafana/Prometheus, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor)
• Experience with CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, ArgoCD, or similar)
• At least one active cloud certification is required — AWS or Azure, such as:
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate or Professional)
  • AWS Certified DevOps Engineer (Associate or Professional)
  • Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305)

Preferred Qualifications

• Multiple AWS and/or Azure certifications strongly preferred
• FinOps Certified Practitioner (FinOps Foundation) or equivalent experience
• Experience with FinOps tooling such as CloudHealth, Apptio Cloudability, AWS Cost Explorer, or Azure Cost Management
• Familiarity with database performance tuning for Aurora PostgreSQL/MySQL and SQL Server
• Experience in a regulated industry (financial services, healthcare, etc.)
• Background in capacity planning and demand forecasting
• Experience working in a global or multinational organization.

Physical Demands & Working Conditions

• Primarily sedentary work with frequent use of computer, keyboard, and mouse.
• Occasional lifting or moving of computer equipment or other objects up to 25 pounds may be required.

Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.