Platform Engineer (GCP)

Job Title - Platform Engineer (GCP)

Location: Leeds, Bristol, Edinburgh,& Halifax. (2 times a week Onsite)

Employment Type: Contract (Inside Ir35).

Skills Required:

GCP/GKE | Apache Kafka | Confluent Platform/CFK | Conduktor Gateway | Multi-region resilience | Terraform & automation | Security/Vault/IAM | SRE & observability | Self-service/IDP | Large-scale Kafka migration

Scope of service:

A hands-on Principal or Chief Platform Engineer who has designed, built, migrated and operated enterprise Apache Kafka or Confluent platforms on GCP/GKE, with demonstrable production implementation of Conduktor Gateway or an equivalently deep Kafka-protocol gateway capability. The candidate must have owned multi-tenant security, multi-zone/multi-region resilience, Terraform-led automation, observability, SRE/on-call operation and developer self-service in a regulated or mission-critical environment.

Non-negotiable:

• Production Kafka/Confluent architecture and operations
• Deep GCP and GKE engineering
• Stateful Kubernetes and persistent-storage experience
• Kafka security and multi-tenancy
• Terraform, Helm, CI/CD and scripting
• Kafka resilience, capacity and performance ownership
• SRE/on-call and major-incident experience
• Full lifecycle ownership across design, build and run
• Strongly desirable
• Direct Conduktor Gateway production experience
• Confluent for Kubernetes
• kRaft migration
• Confluent Cluster Linking/Replicator
• HashiCorp Vault integration
• Backstage/IDP and Golden Paths
• Confluent Cloud migration
• Banking, payments or another regulated critical-service environment