What are the responsibilities and job description for the GCP Cloud Architect (W2/Hybrid) position at Highbrow Technology Inc?
Role: GCP Cloud Architect
Location: Greenwood Village, Colorado
Work Mode: Hybrid
Employment Type: W2 or 1099 Contract
Travel: Up to 20%
Job Summary
We are looking for an experienced Senior GCP Cloud Architect to lead enterprise cloud architecture, integration, modernization, and migration initiatives. The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), hybrid and multi-cloud environments, enterprise integration patterns, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and cloud security and governance.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the architecture, design, and governance of enterprise GCP solutions supporting digital transformation and modernization initiatives.
- Design hybrid and multi-cloud architectures integrating GCP with on-premises data centers, enterprise applications, and third-party platforms.
- Establish scalable integration patterns using APIs, microservices, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native services.
- Lead legacy application, virtual machine, and workload modernization and migration to GKE, Cloud Run, and other cloud-native platforms.
- Define migration strategies, deployment roadmaps, transition architectures, and cutover plans.
- Architect event-driven integration frameworks using Pub/Sub, Eventarc, Kafka, and related messaging technologies.
- Design data integration and ingestion solutions using BigQuery, Dataflow, Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, and associated GCP data services.
- Establish API management standards, service communication models, and reusable enterprise integration frameworks.
- Drive IaC adoption using Terraform, Terragrunt, Ansible, GitOps, and configuration management practices.
- Partner with DevOps, SRE, and application teams to implement CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation.
- Define cloud security, governance, compliance, IAM, encryption, networking, and observability standards.
- Lead architecture reviews and technical design workshops while mentoring engineering, platform, and integration teams.
- Collaborate with business stakeholders and engineering leaders to translate strategic objectives into scalable cloud solutions.
Required Qualifications
- 8 years of experience in enterprise IT architecture, including 4 years of hands-on GCP architecture, design, and implementation experience.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field. Master's degree preferred.
- Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect or Professional Cloud Network Engineer / Security Engineer certification.
- Strong expertise in GCP architecture, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud environments, and enterprise application modernization.
- Experience with API gateway architectures, including Apigee and Cloud Endpoints, and synchronous/asynchronous integration patterns.
- Hands-on experience with event-driven systems, Pub/Sub, Kafka, distributed caching, and microservices.
- Deep knowledge of Kubernetes/GKE, container networking, ingress controllers, Helm charts, and service meshes.
- Production-level expertise in Terraform, GitOps workflows, Terragrunt, Ansible, and configuration management.
- Practical knowledge of GCP Shared VPCs, Cloud Interconnect, firewall rules, Private Service Connect, and Cloud Armor.
- Experience with cloud security, identity and access management, encryption, compliance, governance, and observability.