Principal Platform Engineer (GCP) - Contract, Outside IR35 at Crosstide, Newcastle, 3 Months, £around-£per per day

Location: Remote first (2-3 days on site in the North East during week one)
Start: November 2026
Duration: 3 months initial, 5 days per week
Rate: Around £650 per day depending on experience, Outside IR35
Sector: Financial services

About the opportunity

Crosstide is looking for a hands-on Principal Platform Engineer to join a financial services client building a new Automated Developer Platform on Google Cloud. The platform runs in its own GCP organisation alongside the client's existing estate, and the first teams to adopt it are building savings services in Go, using Kafka and databases.

You'll be one of three Crosstide engineers Embedded in the client's small platform team for phase one, a three-month push to strengthen the shared platform services and add observability, developer experience and disaster recovery. This is a hands-on build role, not a design-only one. The team has a strong bias for action, is happy to try things and throw code away, and works in the open on Slack with very few meetings.

What you'll be doing

• Hardening the shared platform services: Kubernetes with GitOps, Kafka and databases, automated so teams can self-serve
• Helping promote the GCP foundation blueprint into production
• Setting up OpenTelemetry so observability is Back End agnostic and the platform relies less on Datadog
• Owning the route to live and working closely with the client's engineers on observability and the production blueprint
• Providing technical leadership to the other two Crosstide engineers (Developer Experience and Disaster Recovery) and unblocking their work

What you'll bring

• Deep GCP platform engineering experience, including landing zones, IAM and networking
• GKE with GitOps using Argo CD or Flux
• Strong Terraform and CI/CD skills
• Experience running Kafka and databases as platform services
• Hands-on OpenTelemetry experience
• A background in regulated financial services

Nice to have

• Go
• Grafana LGTM stack, or experience migrating off Datadog
• AI-assisted engineering practices

Good to know

• The client provides a Mac, and system access is set up over the first week or two.
• After onboarding, there's no office attendance requirement. The team usually meets in person on Wednesdays, but that's optional.
• Contractors take a break from about 21 December to 4 January.