GCP Platform Engineer

Senior Platform Engineer – Google Cloud (GCP) Salary: Up to £95,000 + £5,500 car allowance + up to 15% bonus Location: Watford – Hybrid (typically 1 day per week in the office) I’m working with a well-established UK retailer undergoing a significant technology transformation, looking for a Senior Platform Engineer with deep Google Cloud Platform (GCP) expertise to help shape and optimise its cloud infrastructure. This is an opportunity to take ownership of an established GCP environment, assess its architecture and identify opportunities to improve security, scalability, reliability and performance, while supporting exciting initiatives across data and AI. The Role You’ll join an established platform engineering team, working closely with platform architects, SREs and an external managed service provider. Initially, much of your focus will be on understanding the existing environment, assessing its architecture and identifying risks, before developing and delivering a roadmap for improvement. Alongside this, you’ll contribute to the evolution of the cloud platform as the business expands its AI capabilities and makes greater use of its enterprise data lake. Key Responsibilities - Assess the existing GCP platform, identifying architectural risks, technical debt and opportunities for improvement. - Develop and implement a roadmap for remediation, optimisation and cloud platform best practices. - Design, deploy and maintain secure, scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure, with a strong focus on GCP. - Work hands-on with GCP services including GKE, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage and IAM. - Apply Infrastructure as Code principles using Terraform to automate and standardise deployments. - Support multi-cloud integration with AWS, ensuring reliable and secure infrastructure across both environments. - Optimise cloud performance, reliability and cost, applying FinOps principles where appropriate. - Collaborate with engineering teams on data and AI initiatives, helping enable access to enterprise data through the GCP platform. - Provide technical guidance, mentor engineers and contribute to platform architecture and engineering standards. What We’re Looking For - Strong, hands-on experience designing, deploying and operating infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform and deep technical knowledge of GCP services - Strong Infrastructure as Code experience, ideally with Terraform. - Working knowledge of AWS and experience operating in a multi-cloud environment. - Experience assessing existing cloud environments, identifying risks and driving technical improvements. - A solid understanding of cloud security, networking, observability, reliability and cost optimisation. - The ability to work autonomously, take ownership and influence technical decisions. - A collaborative mindset, with the confidence to mentor engineers and work closely with architects and wider engineering teams. The Opportunity - Play a key role in a major technology transformation. - Take ownership of an established GCP platform and influence its future direction. - Work at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, enterprise data and emerging AI initiatives. - Join an established, collaborative platform engineering function with opportunities to shape technical standards and architecture. - Up to £95,000 base salary, £5,500 car allowance and up to 15% annual bonus. - Hybrid working, with typically one day per week in the Watford office.