Senior Cloud Engineer - SC Cleared

Senior GCP Cloud Engineer (Contract, SC) - Kubernetes / GKE / Air-Gapped

THE SHORT VERSION
A UK technology business building AI systems for regulated, security-sensitive environments is standing up a new data platform on Google Cloud, and needs someone to own the ground it runs on. GKE, infrastructure as code, CI/CD and observability, on a deliberately open-source stack with no managed-service shortcuts. You run it yourself rather than consuming managed equivalents. The interesting part is the topology: an edge cluster and a central cluster with replication between them, putting real weight on networking, inter-cluster connectivity and security posture.

This is a GCP role end to end. If your depth is in Azure or AWS, this one won't be the right fit.

THE ENGINEERING PROBLEM

• Split topology. An edge cluster and a central cluster with replication between them. Getting that right is the defining challenge of the role.
• Constrained environments. Deployments into restricted, disconnected and high-classification networks, which changes almost every assumption you can normally make about connectivity and tooling.
• Security by design. Systems are under accreditation scrutiny, so hardening, network policy, secrets management and identity are design inputs rather than afterthoughts.

WHE...