Cloud Engineer

Google Cloud Platform Developer/Architect – Contract

Location: London – 5 days on-site

Contract: 6 months initially, with potential extension

Start Date: Immediate

IR35 Status: Inside IR35

Damia Group is a specialist Talent Solution Provider partnering with leading organisations across technology, financial services, defence and other highly regulated industries. We are currently supporting a major organisation with the appointment of an experienced Google Cloud Platform Architect to join a high-performing engineering and cloud platform team.

This is an excellent opportunity for an experienced Cloud Architect / Platform Engineer to work on complex, enterprise-scale cloud-native environments, influencing architectural decisions and helping shape cloud engineering standards across multiple teams.

The role requires someone who can combine deep hands-on engineering expertise with strong architectural thinking , while being comfortable working with senior technical stakeholders and influencing technology strategy.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and deliver complex, creative software and cloud solutions, applying strategic thinking to ambiguous technical problems and influencing architectural decisions across teams.
• Develop secure, high-quality production code and actively review, debug and improve code produced by other engineers.
• Lead architectural design for cloud-native systems and services, producing comprehensive RFCs, ADRs, architecture diagrams and other technical design documentation.
• Drive operational excellence by identifying patterns in system failures, operational metrics and data, implementing improvements to reliability, performance and observability.
• Lead technology and vendor assessments, conducting technical deep dives and evaluating architectural approaches, technical capabilities and emerging technologies.
• Help develop engineering communities of practice, promoting cloud-native technologies, engineering standards and best practices.
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, technical design and knowledge sharing.
• Contribute to strategic initiatives covering cloud platform standards, CI/CD maturity and Infrastructure-as-Code.
• Design and operate resilient, highly scalable cloud services in line with enterprise security, compliance and public cloud standards.

Required Skills & Experience

• Formal training or certification in software engineering concepts with 5+ years' professional experience in production software development.
• Advanced hands-on experience across system design, application development, testing and operational stability at scale.
• Strong proficiency in modern programming languages, with Go or Python particularly desirable.
• Advanced Kubernetes platform engineering experience, including designing, developing and operating custom Kubernetes Operators and Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs).
• Experience with technologies such as Kubebuilder, Operator SDK or equivalent .
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes internals, API machinery, RBAC, multi-tenancy, observability and production operational practices.
• Proven experience building cloud-native control planes and automation frameworks on Kubernetes, including reconciliation loops, admission controllers, webhooks and custom controllers.
• Strong Google Cloud Platform experience , including architecting, building, deploying and operating production cloud-native workloads using core GCP services.
• Understanding of cloud cost optimisation, security and enterprise architecture principles.
• Strong experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation and deployment strategies .
• Advanced understanding of the Software Development Lifecycle and experience improving engineering practices across teams.
• Strong knowledge of agile engineering methodologies, CI/CD, application resilience, security and capacity planning.
• Demonstrable expertise in a technical discipline such as cloud architecture, distributed systems, security, DevOps or platform engineering.
• Experience working within the financial services sector , including understanding of IT environments, regulatory requirements and operational constraints.
• Practical experience using AI-assisted developer tools and AI agents , such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code or equivalent.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to explain complex technical decisions and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Desirable Skills

• Advanced Infrastructure-as-Code experience, particularly Terraform, CloudFormation or CDK .
• Strong observability and monitoring experience with technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog or CloudWatch .
• Relevant Google Cloud certifications , such as Developer, Solutions Architect or Security.
• Experience implementing cloud security practices including secure coding, threat modelling, compliance and incident response.
• Open-source contributions or a strong track record of technical knowledge sharing.
• Experience leading multi-team initiatives spanning infrastructure, application and platform engineering.