DevOps Engineering - AWS Heavy

# Fractional / On-Demand AWS DevOps Engineer We are an early-stage healthcare AI company preparing to launch with live beta sites. Our AWS platform was originally built by a larger development team. We are now operating with a smaller team, and our DevOps engineer recently accepted another position. We need an experienced AWS DevOps engineer who can step in on an hourly, on-demand basis to help us simplify, stabilize and manage the environment. Our immediate priorities are: * Analyze and significantly reduce our current AWS costs. * Safely place unused development and production services into an on-demand or “sleep when idle” configuration. * Preserve a reliable, documented process for bringing production back to an always-on configuration as beta usage grows. * Create a clean AWS prototyping/sandbox environment that closely mirrors our development architecture. * Improve CI/CD, deployment consistency, monitoring, rollback and environment management. * Identify unused or legacy infrastructure and guide the founder on what can safely be stopped, consolidated or removed. * Document the environment and provide clear, practical recommendations without creating unnecessary complexity. Our AWS environment currently includes multiple AWS accounts and services such as ECS/Fargate, ECR, Aurora Serverless v2, Kinesis, Lambda, EventBridge, ALB, S3, CloudFront, Cognito, VPC/NAT, CloudWatch, KMS, Secrets Manager and AWS Organizations. Infrastructure is managed primarily through AWS CDK, with GitHub-based repositories and CI/CD workflows. We are looking for someone who: * Has strong hands-on AWS architecture, DevOps and FinOps experience. * Can quickly understand an existing multi-account AWS environment. * Is comfortable working with containerized services, serverless systems, networking, databases and CI/CD. * Can implement safe sleep/wake, scaling and cost-control strategies without compromising data or security. * Can help establish a practical sandbox-to-development-to-production promotion process. * Communicates clearly with a technical founder and can explain risk, cost and tradeoffs in plain language. * Works quickly and efficiently, with good judgment about when to make a small fix versus recommend a larger architectural change. * Has experience with healthcare, HIPAA-sensitive systems or security-conscious environments as a plus. This is not currently a full-time role. We need someone available hourly for an initial assessment and cleanup, followed by ongoing on-demand support as we prepare to bring beta practices live. The engagement could grow as usage and infrastructure needs increase. Please include a brief description of similar AWS environments you have managed, your hourly rate, availability, and an example of how you have reduced AWS costs while preserving the ability to scale back up quickly.