Lead Cloud Engineer - Principal GCP & AI Engineer

Lead Cloud Engineer

Contract | £800 per Day

Google Cloud | Platform Engineering | AI/Agentic Infrastructure | iGaming

We’re partnering with a leading technology consultancy to appoint an experienced Lead Cloud Engineer for a high-profile engagement within the iGaming sector.

This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role combining cloud platform engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, software engineering and AI infrastructure.

As Lead Cloud Engineer, you’ll take ownership of the technical direction of a complex client engagement, working closely with senior engineering stakeholders to define standards, challenge existing approaches and ensure successful delivery.

You’ll design and build modern Google Cloud platform foundations while also developing the infrastructure required to deploy and operate AI models and agents securely at scale.

You’ll play a key role in shaping and delivering cloud and AI platform capability by:

• Owning the technical direction of a client engagement and leading the engineers responsible for delivery.
• Defining engineering standards across automation, testing, documentation, security and operational readiness.
• Designing and building Google Cloud landing zones and platform foundations, including project structures, Shared VPCs and Identity and Access Management.
• Ensuring infrastructure, configuration and platform changes are managed as code.
• Contributing to technical proposals, pre-sales scoping and architecture reviews with clients.

You’ll be a senior Cloud or Platform Engineer with a strong combination of Google Cloud, Kubernetes, software engineering, SRE, data engineering and production AI experience.

The ideal profile will demonstrate a hybrid skill set across approximately 40% Cloud/Platform/SRE, 30% Software Engineering & AI and 30% Data Engineering, with security, governance, observability and cost management embedded throughout.

You will also have:

• Advanced experience with Google Cloud Platform.
• Strong Infrastructure as Code expertise using Terraform, with exposure to tools such as Infrastructure Manager, Config Connector or Helm.
• Strong knowledge of clusters, nodes, pods, networking, storage, admission control, multi-tenancy and upgrades.
• Deep networking expertise
• A strong FinOps and cost-optimisation mindset.

• Experience building shared platform capability supporting multiple agents, including identity, logging, guardrails, budget enforcement and governed model access.
• Experience developing automation or custom AI agents using Go, Python or Node.js.
• Experience with model evaluation, versioning, latency and cost controls, explainability and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Exposure to platforms such as Amazon Bedrock, AWS AgentCore, Azure AI Studio or LangChain would be beneficial.

• Experience deploying and maintaining data orchestration platforms such as dbt or Apache Airflow.
• Strong understanding of ETL/ELT methodologies.
• Experience with real-time streaming technologies such as Pub/Sub or Apache Kafka.
• Knowledge of vector databases and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures.

• Experience implementing modern observability tooling such as Google Cloud Observability, Prometheus, Grafana and OpenTelemetry.
• Experience with automated cost-control tooling such as Karpenter, Infracost, OpenCost or Cloud Custodian.
• Understanding of per-agent cost forecasting across tokens, tool calls, retries, storage and observability.

Direct experience within iGaming would be highly advantageous.

We’re also interested in candidates from other highly regulated, high-volume or latency-sensitive sectors such as:

• Financial Services
• Payments
• FinTech
• Trading

You’ll also need proven experience operating in a client-facing consulting environment, with the ability to:

• Challenge technical decisions constructively.
• Understand commercial realities.
• Work within strict SLAs, timescales and budgets.
• Lead technical teams through complex delivery environments.

Multiple professional-level certifications would be advantageous, including:

• Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect
• Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer
• Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
• Claude Certified Architect – Foundations
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
• Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert / AZ-305
• AWS Generative AI or Machine Learning certifications

Equivalent cloud, AI, Kubernetes or architecture certifications will also be considered.

This is an excellent opportunity to lead the technical direction of a complex cloud and AI engagement within a highly regulated, technology-led environment.

In return, you’ll benefit from:

• A senior technical leadership position with real ownership of architecture and engineering direction.
• The opportunity to work across advanced Google Cloud, Kubernetes and production AI platforms.
• Exposure to large-scale, high-availability and latency-sensitive environments.
• The opportunity to take emerging AI capability from prototype through to secure, governed production.
• A role combining hands-on engineering, architecture, technical leadership and client consulting.
• The chance to work on complex transformation programmes where resilience, security, scale and cost efficiency are genuinely critical.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

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