Senior Consultant (Cost Optimisation)

Start date: October 2023, or earlier

Type: Permanent, full-time

Hours: 37.5 per week

Location: Hybrid. You can work from your home, though you must be able to travel to our Farringdon, Central London office or client sites (mostly London) as required. This is likely to be once per week at the least.

About Capacitas

Founded in 2002 and based in London, Capacitas is the only consulting firm specialising exclusively in reducing cost and performance risk in business-critical IT systems.

• We are thought leaders and trusted advisors in IT Performance Assurance.
• We have a unique methodology that strikes the balance between service, risk and cost.
• We have extensive experience protecting high revenue, high availability clients.
• We invest in R&D - developing solutions to enable fast, efficient and scalable delivery.

At Capacitas we know what great performance looks like for our clients and their customers. We enable our client’s IT systems to be available, fast and cost efficient without slowing their rate of business change.

• Number of employees – circa 60.
• Our clients include – JD Sports, EasyJet, Deloitte, UKHSA, and many more.
• To hear more about us and what we do for our clients please read the rest of our website.

 

About the role

As a Senior Consultant with Capacitas, you will be quickly utilised on client engagements, working as part of a project team with experienced and talented colleagues. You will most often be in a client facing role and the range of projects you work on will vary according to current demand and your professional development path. Typical projects include:

• Looking for ways to reduce client money spent on IT performance
• Cost Ops and Fin Ops
• Automating through the use of DevOps capability
• Conducting systems risk management assessments
• Performance audits
• Designing performance test plans to address performance risk
• Demand forecasting/planning
• Development of capacity and performance models
• Proactive system monitoring to identify performance risks

 

A day in the life of a Capacitas Senior Consultant includes:

• Leading small teams on complex projects
• Managing, planning and executing the delivery of complex projects
• Leading or participating in daily stand-up meetings with your project team
• Chairing team meetings
• Assisting, mentoring and line managing junior staff, following our people management processes
• Creating and executing thorough plans including budgeting, resourcing and risk management, taking into account dependencies and assumptions.
• Exercising your strong technical knowledge and continuously deepening your technical skills, so that you are able to unblock technical issues for others, train a team and learn new tools as required
• Serving as an internal point of contact in the area of technical expertise, tailoring guidance given depending on colleague needs
• Transferring your technical knowledge to juniors, providing feedback and support to facilitate the development of others
• Leading/working as part of a team and independently to carry out technical work for client project delivery
• Presenting to various audiences, catering to different backgrounds and levels of technical knowledge in the audience
• Establishing, maintaining and deepening relationships with senior stakeholders, exploring true client needs and where Capacitas can add value
• Applying a strong understanding of our business and client needs to propose approaches to deliver value for clients, acting as a solution architect
• Supporting our marketing strategy by creating content for insights, creating blogs and creating sales collateral
• Strategically growing and nurturing your professional network
• Ensuring key processes for complex projects are documented and applying our IP efficiently across projects/departments
• Create IP drawings on deep technical knowledge, also review and oversee IP creation by juniors

 

About the applicant - to thrive in this role, it is important you:

1) Are motivated by:

• An inherent desire to work in tech.
• An inherent desire to work with, add value to, and satisfy clients.
• An inherent desire to continuously learn and grow.
• Working in a collaborative environment in which you support and are supported by others.

 

2) Show the following behaviors:

• Enjoy seeking, building and maintaining relationships, demonstrating empathy and emotional intelligence in interpersonal interactions to build productive working relationships.
• Demonstrate flexibility and adaptability in response to changing conditions and/or priorities.
• Demonstrate resilience and persistence in the face of challenges, seeing setbacks as a positive opportunity for growth.
• Are alert to market trends or occurrences and are able to consider how Capacitas and our clients may be impacted by these.
• Confidence to try new things and challenge the status quo.
• Actively listen and understand client and colleague needs.
• Demonstrate curiosity about customers’ technical and business environments.
• Share knowledge with others and reach out to others to ask for their expertise.
• Seek challenging problems to solve.
• Demonstrate ownership of own work.
• Drive own development, seeking and pursuing opportunities for continuous growth.

 

3) Have the following experience and abilities:

Technical

Essential

• Experience delivering cloud cost optimisation, identifying opportunities for reduced spend
• Good working knowledge of one of major cloud provider (AWS, Azure or GCP)
• Experience dealing with private cloud provider, e.g. IBM, OVH
• Proven experience of financial numeracy, e.g. calculating savings, working out percentage growth, statistical and reporting skills
• Financial modelling
• Working knowledge of either python, advanced excel, power BI or any similar data processing tools
• Ability to analyse, interpret and manage information, data and trends
• Data analysis, including moving averages, CPU aggregation and normalising
• Some understanding of IT infrastructure
• At least intermediate excel skills for data analysis, with willingness to learn advanced excel skills
• At least intermediate powerpoint and word skills
• Excellent attention to detail

Desirable

• Performance testing skills using HP, LoadRunner or Jmeter
• Performance test design
• Performance test automation skills
• Monitoring, including basic and complex metric understanding, and familiarity with monitoring agents
• Capacity planning and modelling skills

 

Other

Essential

• Able to engage, motivate and influence a team to deliver, creating a high performing team where people are empowered, can be themselves, use their strengths and collaborate
• Able to make decisions in ambiguity, drawing on informed assumptions or estimates
• Able to communicate to influence
• Strong analytical skills
• Stakeholder management skills
• Project management skills
• Able to establish credibility with senior stakeholders, to be seen as a SME
• Communicates and presents clearly and professionally, inspiring trust and confidence
• Able to communicate technical concepts to non-technical people and adapt information given to audience
• Able to apply a problem-solving mentality and approach
• Able to understand customer requirements and business objectives
• Able to work effectively as part of a team and independently
• Able to learn quickly
• Willingness and ability to learn new technical tools
• Able to give and receive feedback effectively
• Able to facilitate and support the development of others through coaching mentoring and training
• Is self-aware, aware of own and others’ needs, able to adapt own behavior based on the situation and varied stakeholders to get the best response

 

Qualifications

2.1 degree (or equivalent), or an advanced degree in one of the following areas:

• Computing.
• Sciences.
• Engineering.
• Mathematics.

OR

• 2.1 bachelors or advanced degree from any discipline + demonstrated desire and aptitude, proven through work experience, to work in tech

 

Technical tools you may use as a Consultant

• AWS, Azure
• Cost-explorer
• AWS Console & CLI
• Cloudwatch
• APIs (further performance metrics)
• Monitoring tools for CPU
• Tagging and quicksight
• Reporting software, e.g. Cloudheath
• PRTG
• Zabex
• MatLab
• GitHub
• J-Meter
• Gatling
• Scripting and coding software
• PowerQuery
• PowerBI

 

What our Senior Consultants most like about being a consultant at Capacitas

• Space to use individual strengths within the role
• Permissive culture, with freedom to do and say things respectfully
• Work environment is lateral, everyone works together. We are supportive and collaborative

 

How can you find out more?

We encourage and welcome any enquiries from prospective candidates. Please feel free to contact Neil McMenemy for an informal discussion about the role.

 

Apply Now