Senior Cloud Native GCP Engineer

Senior Cloud Native GCP Engineer
Clearance required: BPSS
Interview process: Tech IV
Location: Hybrid 60% remote-40% onsite at client office in London, but client teams are mostly remote.
IR35 Status: PAYE via Umbrella company only

A senior engineer to join a modern engineering practice across commercial trading business of a multi-brand retailer. This role requires deep hands-on experience across open-source development stacks, cloud-native architecture using Google Cloud services and strong capability in driving automation, observability, and platform excellence.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of microservices-based architecture to build scalable, secure, and maintainable applications
• Develop, deploy, and maintain microservices using Spring Boot, Node.js, React
• Deploy, manage, and scale applications in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environments
• Implement cloud-native solutions using containerization technologies like Docker and orchestration tools such as Kubernetes (GKE)
• Drive automation across the SDLC using CI/CD pipelines, GitOps, and modern DevSecOps workflows (eg, Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions)
• Use Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) with Terraform for provisioning and environment consistency
• Collaborate with architects and product teams to design robust and future-ready solutions
• Champion engineering excellence, clean code practices, observability, and shift-left security
• Work with the junior engineers to uplift development standards across squads
• Lead the path for introducing AI/GenAI tooling for driving adoption across each phase of SDLC (analysis, design, development, testing and deployment)

Essential Skills & Experience

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including recent work in a lead engineer capacity
• Strong Back End development experience using Spring Boot and microservices patterns
• Front End development exposure with frameworks like React or Angular (nice to have)
• Hands-on experience with Google Cloud core services (eg, GKE, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, IAM)
• Solid expertise in Terraform and Infrastructure-as-Code practices
• Strong CI/CD and DevOps toolchain knowledge: GitLab CI, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, etc.
• Deep understanding of containerization (Docker) and Kubernetes deployments
• Familiarity with security, observability (eg OpenTelemetry, Stackdriver), and SRE principles
• Experience in integrating AI/GenAI tools (eg, Gemini Code Assist, LangChain) into engineering workflows
• Worked in enterprise transformation programs involving both Legacy and modern tech stacks
• Experience with service mesh (eg, Istio) and API gateways
• Contributions to open-source or engineering communities