GCP Cloud Platform Engineer

Summary

The Cloud Platform Engineer is responsible for implementing all GCP resources using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), establishing CI / CD pipelines for automated infrastructure testing and deployment, and configuring comprehensive monitoring that ensures 99.9% platform availability. This role is critical to preventing configuration drift, security vulnerabilities, and deployment failures that cause production outages at enterprise scale. The Platform Engineer ensures infrastructure changes are tested, version-controlled, and reversible, enabling rapid, safe deployment of security updates and platform enhancements critical for maintaining HIPAA compliance and healthcare operations availability.

Required Qualifications

Infrastructure as Code Expertise

5+ years of cloud infrastructure engineering experience with at least 2+ years focused on Infrastructure as Code

Expert-level Terraform proficiency including :

Advanced module development with complex dependencies

State management, workspaces, and remote backends

Provider configuration and version pinning

Resource lifecycle management and import procedures

Terraform Cloud or Enterprise experience (preferred)

Experience implementing CI / CD for infrastructure using Cloud Build, Jenkins, GitLab CI, or GitHub Actions

Strong understanding of infrastructure automation patterns and DevOps practices

Proficiency with Git including branching strategies, pull requests, and code review workflows

Google Cloud Platform Experience

Strong GCP knowledge across compute, storage, networking, and security services

Hands-on experience with Google Cloud SDK (gcloud CLI) for scripting and automation

Understanding of GCP organizational hierarchy (organizations, folders, projects, resources)

Experience with VPC networking including subnets, firewall rules, Cloud VPN, and VPC peering

Knowledge of IAM at organizational scale including custom roles, conditions, and service accounts

Familiarity with GCP security services (VPC Service Controls, Cloud KMS, DLP, Security Command Center)

Monitoring & Observability

Experience implementing Cloud Monitoring and Logging for production systems

Knowledge of SLI / SLO frameworks and error budget tracking

Proficiency with log analysis and troubleshooting using Cloud Logging

Understanding of alerting best practices and on-call procedures

Experience with dashboard creation for different stakeholder audiences

Familiarity with distributed tracing for complex system debugging

DevOps & SRE Practices

Strong understanding of DevOps principles including automation, collaboration, and continuous improvement

Experience with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices and methodologies

Knowledge of incident management procedures and post-mortem processes

Understanding of capacity planning and performance optimization

Experience with deployment strategies (blue / green, canary, rolling updates)

Familiarity with chaos engineering and resiliency testing

Scripting & Programming

Strong Python or Go proficiency for automation scripting and tooling development

Proficiency with Bash scripting for operational automation

Understanding of YAML for configuration management and pipeline definitions

Experience with Jinja2 or similar templating for dynamic configuration generation

Basic understanding of data structures and algorithms for efficient scripting

Preferred Qualifications

Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect or Cloud DevOps Engineer certification

Healthcare industry experience with understanding of HIPAA compliance requirements

Experience with policy-as-code tools (Terraform Sentinel, OPA, Config Validator)

Knowledge of Kubernetes and GKE for containerized workload management

Familiarity with service mesh technologies (Istio, Anthos Service Mesh)

Experience with HashiCorp Vault or similar secret management solutions

Background in security hardening and compliance automation

Understanding of FinOps principles and cloud cost optimization

Experience with configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet)

Knowledge of GitOps patterns using tools like ArgoCD or Flux