Sr. Forward Deployed Engineer, Cloud Cost & Billing

Employment: W2 hourly contract (approximately 7 weeks, November to mid-December 2026)

Location: Remote, US-based

Hours: 40 hours per week

Launch Consulting is looking for a senior engineer to lead a fast proof of concept for a leading academic medical center’s digital health platform. The platform’s customers (researchers, startups and biopharma partners) incur costs across Google Cloud, partner Azure tenants, LLM usage and people-based services. You will design and build a cloud-independent system that captures those costs, allocates them to the right customer and project, and shows each customer what they used. You will be the technical lead and the only engineer, working alongside a Launch engagement manager and the client’s product, engineering and finance teams.

What you will do

• Lead requirements sessions with Product and Finance on cost sources, tenants, allocation rules and reporting needs.
• Design a cloud-independent cost data model aligned to the FOCUS standard where practical.
• Propose a unit of measure and sample SKU structure that rolls up raw cloud line items.
• Design and build a usage and cost API for event intake and read access.
• Build ingestion from Google Cloud and Azure billing exports and at least one application usage feed.
• Implement tag-based and rule-based allocation, including shared-cost distribution and a partner reimbursement view.
• Build a basic tenant-scoped dashboard with summary and line-item costs.
• Write the evaluation report, forecasting recommendation and production roadmap, and present them to sponsors.

What you will bring

• 8+ years in data, platform or cloud engineering.
• Hands-on experience building cost allocation, chargeback or showback systems.
• Direct work with Google Cloud billing data in BigQuery and Azure Cost Management exports.
• Strong data modeling, SQL and Python skills, and REST API design experience.
• Experience building multi-tenant data views with proper access scoping.
• Comfort leading technical work solo and explaining it to finance and product leaders.

Nice to have

• FOCUS specification experience.
• Kubernetes cost allocation and tagging standards.
• LLM usage metering, Prometheus or OpenTelemetry.
• Healthcare or research data platform experience.