Google Workspace SME

Role:
Google Workspace SME

Rate: £ PRICE IN inside IR35

Location:

Knutsford Cheshire FT onsite

Duration: 6 months +

We are looking for an experienced Google Workspace Architect and Subject Matter Expert (SME) to support the design, development and delivery of a large-scale Google Workspace implementation for a major enterprise client. This role carries particular emphasis on business continuity: the successful candidate will have hands-on experience designing and building solutions that enable the invocation of crisis management and business continuity processes from a Microsoft 365 environment into Google Workspace, ensuring organisations can maintain communication, collaboration and operational continuity when their primary Microsoft toolset is unavailable.

This is a hands-on architecture and delivery role, combining strategic solution design with deep technical SME input, working alongside delivery, security and business continuity teams to embed Google Workspace as a resilient secondary/crisis platform within a predominantly Microsoft-based enterprise estate.

• Lead the architecture, design and technical delivery of Google Workspace solutions across a large-scale enterprise environment (10,000+ users), including Gmail, Drive, Meet, Chat, Calendar, Admin Console and related services.
• Design and build the technical solution enabling business continuity / crisis management invocation - i.e. failover, activation and operational cutover processes that move critical communication and collaboration capability from Microsoft 365 (Teams, Outlook, SharePoint) to Google Workspace during an incident.
• Define the end-to-end crisis activation workflow: triggers, identity and access provisioning, data/user onboarding, communication cascade, and rollback/deactivation procedures.
• Act as the primary SME for Google Workspace within the programme, providing technical guidance, best practice and governance to delivery teams, architects and business stakeholders.
• Design secure, scalable Google Workspace architectures covering identity and access management (including federation/SSO with Microsoft Entra  / Active Directory), data security, DLP, device management and compliance.
• Develop integration patterns between Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 / Azure AD to support hybrid operation and crisis interoperability.
• Produce architecture artefacts: solution designs, high-level and low-level design documents, runbooks, crisis invocation playbooks and operational procedures.
• Support business continuity and disaster recovery planning, working with BC/DR, security and risk teams to align the Google Workspace crisis solution with wider organisational resilience strategy.
• Lead or support proof-of-concept (PoC) and pilot phases, demonstrating crisis invocation capability to business and technical stakeholders.
• Provide technical leadership through implementation, migration, testing (including crisis simulation/failover testing) and hypercare phases.
• Mentor and provide technical direction to junior engineers and consultants within the delivery team.
• Engage directly with client stakeholders, presenting solution designs, trade-offs and recommendations at both technical and business level.

• 10+ years of delivery experience in Google Workspace implementation, architecture or engineering, ideally within large, complex, regulated organisations (e.g. financial services or similar large-scale enterprises).
• Current Google Workspace certification(s) - e.g. Google Workspace Administrator certification and/or other relevant Google Cloud/Workspace credentials.
• Proven, demonstrable experience designing and delivering a business continuity / crisis management solution enabling invocation from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace, including practical knowledge of the technical, security and operational challenges involved.
• Strong hands-on expertise across core Google Workspace services:
  Admin Console, Gmail, Drive/Shared Drives, Meet, Chat, Calendar, Groups, Vault, and endpoint/device management.
• Solid understanding of Microsoft 365 architecture (Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, Azure AD/Entra ) sufficient to design credible interoperability and failover solutions between the two platforms.
• Experience with identity and access management, federation and SSO across hybrid Microsoft/Google environments.
• Track record of delivering enterprise-scale technology solutions for large organisations, including large user-base migrations and rollouts.
• Strong understanding of business continuity planning, disaster recovery principles and crisis management frameworks.
• Excellent stakeholder management, communication and documentation skills, with the ability to translate technical design into business-understandable terms.
• Experience operating within formal delivery frameworks (Agile/Waterfall), producing SOWs, design authority documentation and governance artefacts as required.

• Experience with in financial services or other…