GCP Platform Engineer Lead (Infrastructure)

TITLE: GCP Platform Engineer Lead

NO C2C 3RD PARTY VENDORS/CANDIDATES!!!

JOB DESCRIPTION:

Client is looking for a GCP Platform Engineer to lead our GCP Cloud Engineering team, owning the Google Cloud Platform for the enterprise. This is a foundational platform role — you are the GCP technical authority, setting architectural/engineering direction, establishing engineering standards, and ensuring the platform is secure, scalable, and built to last.

Your role will include driving designs of the platform, mentoring the engineers around you, and aligning quality and best practices. You bring deep GCP expertise, a platform-owner mindset, and the leadership presence to align engineers and stakeholders around a shared technical vision. This role demands a cloud-first thinker who ensures cloud solutions meet business needs efficiently while prioritizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to create repeatable, automated deployments. You need to have a proven track record of architecting cloud environments from scratch . You'll drive cloud transformation initiatives all CSP's focusing on the GCP platform while ensuring every design decision considers security, reliability, and scalability.

This is not a hands-off leadership role — you write code, review designs, and stay close to the work.

Major Responsibilities

1. GCP Platform Ownership

• Own the enterprise GCP platform end-to-end: organization structure, resource hierarchy, networking architecture while collaborating with several teams to ensure the platform is stable and compliant.
• Define and maintain the GCP landing zone — Shared VPC, Org Policies, and project factory patterns — as the foundation all product teams build on.
• Serve as the one of the final technical authorities on GCP engineering decisions, reviewing designs for scalability, security, and operational excellence before they reach production.
• Build self-service platform capabilities that enable product engineering teams to move fast without compromising standards.

2. Technical Team Leadership

• Lead the GCP cloud engineering team as the technical anchor — set direction, conduct design reviews, unblock engineers, and drive delivery on platform initiatives.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards: IaC patterns, naming conventions, tagging strategy, branching models, and deployment practices.
• Mentor engineers at all levels, building depth on the team and raising the bar on what "excellent” looks like in cloud engineering.
• Partner with architecture, security, operations, and business stakeholders to translate enterprise requirements into platform capabilities.

3. Infrastructure as Code & Automation

• Drive Infrastructure as code as a core principle — reusable modules, pipeline integration, state management, and policy guardrails.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines using Cloud Build, GitHub Actions, and Artifact Registry for both platform infrastructure and application teams.
• Write production-quality automation to extend platform functionality, integrate GCP APIs, and eliminate operational toil.
• Implement policy-as-code using OPA, Config Connector, and GCP Org Policies to enforce governance at scale without manual gatekeeping.

4. Networking, Security & Compliance

• Architect/Engineer GCP networking: Shared VPC, VPC Service Controls, Private Service Connect, NCC, Cloud NAT, and hybrid connectivity via Cloud Interconnect and HA VPN.
• Own the enterprise security posture on GCP — Workload Identity Federation, Binary Authorization, Secret Manager, IAM least-privilege design, and SIEM/CSPM integration (Security Command Center, Prisma Cloud, or Wiz).
• Drive continuous automated compliance across applicable regulatory frameworks (HIPAA, PCI, SOC 2) so controls are enforced in real time, not discovered at audit.
• Integrate observability — Cloud Operations Suite, Datadog, and SLO/SLI frameworks — as a first-class platform capability across all workloads.

5. Platform Strategy & Continuous Improvement

• Own the GCP platform roadmap, evaluating new GCP services and capabilities and making deliberate decisions about what the enterprise adopts and when.
• Incorporate FinOps practices across the platform: committed use discounts, rightsizing, budget alerting, and cost allocation as engineering disciplines, not afterthoughts.
• Research and pilot emerging GCP capabilities like — Vertex AI, GKE Enterprise, Duet AI for DevOps — evaluating their fit for enterprise adoption.
• Foster a culture that drives collaboration across teams and towers to shape the future of cutting-edge cloud technology adoption

Required Qualifications

• 10 years in cloud and infrastructure engineering with 5 years of deep, hands-on GCP experience at enterprise scale.
• Proven ownership of a GCP organization — Resource Hierarchy, Billing, Org Policy, IAM, and multi-project governance in production.
• Demonstrated technical leadership: you have led a platform team or major enterprise cloud initiative, set technical direction, and grown engineers around you.

Deep GCP expertise required across:

Domain

Technologies

Compute & Containers

GKE (Autopilot Standard), Cloud Run, Compute Engine, MIGs

Networking

Shared VPC, VPC Service Controls, Private Service Connect, Cloud Armor, Interconnect

Data & Messaging

BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Dataflow, Cloud Composer

Security

IAM, Workload Identity, SCC, Binary Authorization, Secret Manager, VPC-SC

IaC & Automation

Terraform (modules, remote state, OPA), Cloud Build, Config Connector

Observability

Cloud Operations Suite, Datadog, SLO/SLI design, PagerDuty integration

Languages

Python and Go (required); Bash proficiency expected

Preferred Qualifications

• Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect certification (strongly preferred)
• Google Cloud Professional DevOps Engineer certification
• HashiCorp Terraform Associate or Professional certification
• Experience in regulated industries applying HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or FedRAMP controls on GCP
• Familiarity with Anthos, GKE Enterprise, and multi-cloud connectivity patterns
• Experience with Vertex AI platform and MLOps patterns on GCP

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field — or equivalent demonstrated experience.