About the role
SOE4 – GCP
Overview:
We are seeking a hands-on Lead Systems Operations Engineer to own day-to-day reliability and lifecycle management of workloads on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The role combines deep platform operations (GKE/compute/networking/IAM), automation-first delivery (Terraform/CI-CD), and incident leadership to ensure availability, performance, security, and cost efficiency across mission-critical environments. Lead incident bridges and coordinate cross-functional recovery; ensure clear executive-ready communications.
• Plan and execute patching, upgrades, and maintenance windows for GCP platforms with minimal downtime.
• Implement and govern networking (VPC, subnets, firewall rules, Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud DNS, Cloud NAT, Cloud Armor).
• Build and mature observability using Cloud Logging/Monitoring with actionable s, dashboards, and runbooks.
• Drive IaC with Terraform and pipelines (Cloud Build/GitHub/ADO); enforce change controls and peer reviews.
• Guide engineers on best practices for reliability, security, and cost; review designs and significant changes.
• Manage capacity planning, backup/restore, DR/BCP procedures, and operational readiness reviews.
• Support hybrid connectivity (Cloud VPN/Interconnect) and IAM (principals, service accounts, roles, least privilege).
• Participate in a 24x7 on-call rotation and lead major incident bridges when required.
• Author and maintain runbooks, SOPs, and architecture/operations documentation.
• Champion automation-first delivery; reduce toil via pipelines, policy-as-code, and reusable modules.
• Provide mentorship, code reviews, and training to junior engineers and peers.
• Deliver clear updates to stakeholders and leadership; escalate risks with data and options.
• Adhere to enterprise change controls; validate changes through automated testing and safe rollout/rollback.
Required Skills
• 10+ years of IT/Cloud operations experience with 3+ years administering core GCP services in production.
• Advanced proficiency with Terraform (modules, remote state, workspaces) and Git-based workflows.
• Strong hands-on with GKE operations (node pools, upgrades, autoscaling, RBAC/NetworkPolicy) and container runtime basics.
• Expert troubleshooting across compute, networking, IAM, and storage; proven incident command experience.
• Scripting in Bash/Python; comfort with gcloud/gsutil and platform APIs.
• Solid understanding of security controls (KMS/CMEK, Cloud Armor/WAF, org policies, VPC Service Controls basics).
Desired Skills
• Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer or Cloud Architect; GKE/Kubernetes certifications (CKA/CKS) a plus.
• Experience with cost governance/FinOps (tagging, budgets, s, rightsizing, committed use discounts).
• Exposure to service mesh/ingress (Anthos, Istio) and artifact/image management (Artifact Registry).
• Knowledge of compliance and controls in enterprise environments (CIS benchmarks, least privilege, secrets mgmt).
• Familiarity with incident/problem/change processes (ITIL), SRE practices (SLOs/error budgets), and postmortems.