Head of Engineering

About Duckbill

We are developing a SaaS product called Skyway that simplifies financial planning and analysis of cloud billing data for large enterprises with complex cloud spending requirements.

Enterprise cloud cost management is a deceptively deep problem we believe the entire cost management space is solving the wrong part of the problem.

We're looking for a Head of Engineering to own how Skyway gets built: the architecture, the velocity, the team, and the technical decisions that will compound for years. Today, this is a builder role: you ll be in the code every day and using that credibility to set the pace for everyone around you.

Historically, products in this space have made three fundamental choices:

We’re taking the opposite of all three: our world is consumption-first, we’re recalculating the billing for each provider, and we’re working to solve the entire domain.

We’ve started with a AWS contract management product and expanding over time to handle forecasting, scenario modeling, cost allocation, chargeback/reinvoicing, practice management, and much more. Our goal is to be the system every enterprise runs their cost management practice on.

To accomplish this, we re processing hundreds of millions of rows of billing data per customer, per month. We re turning unstructured commercial contracts into structured data and dynamically recalculating bills using rates from both the contract and public pricing data. We re building a semantic layer that translates technical cloud usage data into business concepts anyone can understand, and we re creating the world s first standardized structure for describing a commercial contract and all of its facets.

There are three core issues we have to solve:

Here s a sample of the kind of problems you ll help us solve:

• A customer s organizational restructure moves $40 million in infrastructure spend from one VP to another overnight—both the historical view and the future view need to be correct, but they need to be correct in different ways.

• A customer has 6,000 people in engineering, 2,000+ application IDs, and a highly matrixed reporting structure. "Who owns this?" is almost impossible to answer, but we need to make it simple. To make matters worse, engineering and finance have wildly different perspectives on this.

• A SaaS provider changes their pricing model, breaking previous known structures. We need to detect it, adapt to it, and recalculate downstream.

• Each provider has dozens of columns in its billing data. When combined with customer-provided data, the dimensions exploded to hundreds or thousands. Given the dimensionality and customer size, the dataset reaches into the terabytes easily. The customer needs to not just be able to query the data, but to also modify the data—and do so faster than a traditional data processing pipeline will allow.

Ship daily and set the pace. This is the single most important part of the job. You ll personally ship working capabilities every day and drive the team to do the same. You identify and remove anything that slows shipping down, whether they be tooling gaps, process bloat, unclear requirements, architectural bottlenecks. The team should be capable of shipping more in month 12 than month 6.

Build the engineering team. You re setting our engineering talent bar. Beyond hiring, you re also responsible for growing these engineers: raising their technical bar and building a culture where your team is doing the best work of their careers so far.

Make architecture decisions that last. Build on a stack and architecture that supports 10–50x growth in data and…