Director of Engineering - Cloud Cost Optimisation Platform (United Kingdom)

Director of Engineering – Cloud Cost Optimisation Platform

About the Role

Virtasant is on a mission to revolutionise cloud cost optimisation. Our platform helps businesses reduce waste and maximise efficiency across multi-cloud environments. We’re looking for a Director of Engineering to lead the continued development of our platform, ensuring both its technical excellence and operational efficiency.

This role is a hybrid of technical leadership, strategic direction, and hands-on engineering, requiring someone who can balance short-term client demands with long-term product vision. You’ll lead a high-performing engineering team, drive AI-driven automation, and scale our platform while ensuring cloud infrastructure best practices.

If you’re passionate about cloud, DevOps, and AI-first automation, and can navigate the complexity of scaling both teams and technology, this is the role for you.

What You’ll Do:

• Lead the engineering and operations teams responsible for building and maintaining Virtasant’s cloud cost optimisation platform.
• Drive the strategic direction of the platform - balancing immediate client needs with long-term scalability, efficiency, and automation.
• Architect and scale cloud infrastructure - ensuring a highly available, cost-effective, and scalable system across AWS and multi-cloud environments.
• Enhance automation & DevOps - implementing best practices to improve engineering efficiency and reduce operational overhead.
• AI-First Approach - explore ways to integrate AI-driven automation into our platform, from optimisation processes to intelligent deployment strategies.
• Balance technical & client-facing responsibilities - collaborate with internal teams, clients, and solution architects to ensure seamless integration of cost optimisation strategies.
• Guide engineering best practices - from Python-based backend development to React-driven front-end solutions, ensuring clean, maintainable, and scalable code.
• Drive a high-performance engineering culture - recruit, mentor, and develop a world-class team.

What We’re Looking For:

• 10+ years in engineering leadership : ideally in a cloud-native, SaaS, or FinOps-focused environment.
• Strong cloud infrastructure experience: AWS expertise is a must, with a deep understanding of scalability, networking, security, and cost optimisation.
• DevOps & Automation: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and a strong understanding of modern DevOps best practices.
• AI/Automation mindset: experience building AI-based automation tools, agents, or cloud optimisation solutions is a huge plus.

Technical expertise in:

• Python (for backend systems)
• React (for front-end development)
• SQL/Data Processing (data-driven decision-making)
• Multiple cloud environments, particularly AWS, GCP, Azure
• AWS ecosystem architecture and design (Lambda, ECS, S3, DynamoDB, etc.)
• Experience balancing product strategy with client demands, understanding trade-offs between short-term fixes and long-term platform evolution.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, evolving environment with strong decision-making, adaptability, and leadership under pressure.

Nice-to-Have Experience:

• Cloud cost optimisation knowledge - understanding billing models, usage patterns, and cost-reduction techniques is a plus.
• Experience leading Solution Architects or client-facing teams - balancing technical leadership with commercial awareness.
• Startup / Scale-up experience - knowing how to grow and scale a tech platform while managing constraints.

Why Join Virtasant?

Fully remote role - work from anywhere while leading a world-class engineering team.

Competitive compensation package with long-term growth opportunities.

Opportunity to shape the future - lead the development of a cutting-edge cloud cost optimisation platform.

AI-first mindset - help define the role of automation and AI in cloud cost efficiency.

Fast-moving, high-impact environment -where your decisions directly shape the success of the product.