Principal GCP Platform Engineer at La Fosse, North East, £800 per day

Principal Platform Engineer (GCP) – Contract

Day Rate: £800 per day Outside Ir35

Contract: Initial 3 months, with potential to extend to 12+ months

Location: Fully remote, with 3-4 days onsite in North East England during the first week for onboarding. Very occasional onsite attendance may be required throughout the contract.

Start Date: ASAP (flexibility for candidates with up to four weeks’ notice)

The Opportunity

We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Platform Engineer to support the development of a new automated developer platform on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) within a regulated financial services environment.

You will work alongside a small, highly technical platform team to strengthen shared platform services, improve observability, enhance developer experience and establish robust production-ready foundations. This is a hands-on role combining engineering delivery with technical leadership across a small team.

The environment favours pragmatic engineering, rapid experimentation and collaborative problem-solving over lengthy design exercises. You will work closely with client engineers to deliver practical solutions that enable development teams to self-serve.

Key Responsibilities

• Harden and automate shared platform services, including Kubernetes, Kafka and databases.
• Help take the existing GCP foundation blueprint into production.
• Build and maintain GKE environments using GitOps principles.
• Implement OpenTelemetry to deliver backend-agnostic observability and reduce dependency on specific monitoring vendors.
• Develop and improve infrastructure automation using Terraform and CI/CD pipelines.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership, unblock engineers and guide implementation across the wider platform team.
• Work collaboratively with engineering teams to improve reliability, scalability and developer self-service.

Essential Experience

• Extensive hands-on GCP platform engineering experience, including landing zones, IAM and networking.
• Strong GKE/Kubernetes experience, ideally using Argo CD or Flux.
• Infrastructure as Code expertise with Terraform and CI/CD.
• Experience delivering shared platform services, including Kafka and databases.
• Practical OpenTelemetry implementation experience.
• Experience working in regulated financial services environments.
• Proven ability to provide technical direction while remaining hands-on.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to articulate technical decisions and solve problems pragmatically.

Desirable Experience

• Go development experience.
• Grafana LGTM stack experience or experience migrating away from Datadog.
• Experience using AI-assisted engineering tools.

Ideal Candidate

You will be an established Principal-level engineer with substantial consultancy or enterprise delivery experience. You can operate independently, make sound technical decisions, support other engineers and deliver production-ready solutions in a fast-moving environment.