GCP Platform Engineer

*Platform Engineer (Google Cloud)*

This role will be on-site at one of the clients' locations: Kansas City, MO; Denver, CO; Chicago, IL; or Houston, TX

About the Role

We are seeking a GCP-dominant Platform Engineer who thinks like a developer but operates at the infrastructure and platform level. This role is deeply hands-on in Google Cloud, with a strong emphasis on cloud-native services rather than Kubernetes-first environments.

You will be embedded directly with product, QA, and data engineering teams, operating as a true partner rather than a support function. The primary focus is enabling and operating a platform that consolidates enterprise data into BigQuery to support analytics, reporting, and downstream use cases.

Responsibilities

• Build, maintain, and review infrastructure-as-code using Terraform and Git-based workflows
• Participate in pull request reviews and collaborate on platform design and implementation
• Design and operate cloud-native services within Google Cloud, including:
• Cloud Run for containerized workloads
• BigQuery
• Apigee
• IAM, networking, and GCP project design
• Partner closely with Data Engineers, QA, and application teams to understand workload behavior and performance
• Monitor and improve reliability, observability, and operational performance of cloud workloads
• Support event-driven and streaming use cases using Confluent (managed Kafka)
• Enable development teams through standardized, self-service platform capabilities
• Balance governance, cost, security, and delivery velocity across the platform

Required Qualifications

• 4–8 years of experience as a Platform Engineer, Cloud Engineer, or Infrastructure Engineer
• Google Cloud is the dominant cloud in your recent experience (50% or more)
• Strong hands-on experience with:
• Terraform
• Git and pull request workflows
• Google Cloud IAM and networking
• Cloud Run
• BigQuery
• Experience working closely with data engineering teams and data pipelines
• Ability to reason across the full stack, from infrastructure design to runtime performance and troubleshooting
• Experience supporting production workloads in cloud environments

Working Style and Team Fit

• Low-drama, collaborative, and solution-oriented
• Proactive and thoughtful, with minimal need for oversight
• Comfortable bringing prior experience to problem-solving discussions
• Curious, analytical, and open to continuous learning
• Values long-term team building and platform sustainability over short-term fixes
• Enjoys thinking holistically about systems and tradeoffs

Team Environment

• Small, senior-focused team (currently two engineers)
• Embedded partnership model with engineering and data teams
• Emphasis on trust, autonomy, and shared ownership
• Culture centered on learning, adaptability, and thoughtful decision-making

Why This Role

This is an opportunity to work deeply within Google Cloud while maintaining broad ownership across platform design, operations, and enablement. The role offers meaningful influence over enterprise data infrastructure and close collaboration with cross-functional teams.