Lead Google Cloud Platform Solution Architect / Principal Engineer

Role: Lead Google Cloud Platform Solution Architect / Principal Engineer
Type: Contract

Location: Remote with Travel
Experience: Senior / Lead level

Role Overview

We are looking for a highly hands-on Google Cloud Platform Solution Architect / Principal Engineer who can design and deliver end-to-end applications on Google Cloud.

This is a coach-player role. The ideal candidate can understand an ambiguous business problem, translate it into a practical technical architecture, lead engineers through implementation, and personally step into development and troubleshooting when needed.

We are not looking for someone who only produces high-level architecture diagrams or recommendations. The person should have strong engineering judgment developed through actually building and operating production applications.

Key Responsibilities

• Design end-to-end applications and solutions on Google Cloud Platform, from requirements through production deployment.
• Make pragmatic architecture decisions based on scale, workload characteristics, performance, reliability, security, cost and operational requirements.
• Select appropriate Google Cloud Platform compute, storage, database, messaging and supporting services based on actual requirements rather than predetermined patterns.
• Design APIs, backend services, data flows and application integrations.
• Evaluate architectural tradeoffs such as monolith vs. microservices, synchronous vs. asynchronous processing, serverless vs. containers, and managed vs. custom solutions.
• Lead technical teams while remaining hands-on with development, debugging, deployment and production issues.
• Build prototypes/POCs when needed to validate architectural decisions.
• Establish practical engineering standards for scalability, observability, resiliency, security and maintainability.
• Work directly with client stakeholders and engineering teams to take loosely defined requirements and turn them into working solutions.
• Coach and mentor developers while taking direct ownership of difficult technical problems.

Required Skills

• Strong hands-on software engineering background with experience building production applications end-to-end.
• Strong experience designing and implementing solutions on Google Cloud Platform (Google Cloud Platform).
• Practical knowledge of core Google Cloud Platform capabilities across compute, storage, databases, networking, messaging/integration, IAM and observability.
• Strong backend/API and distributed application design experience.
• Experience with containers/serverless technologies and modern deployment patterns.
• Strong understanding of scalability, performance, resiliency, security and cost tradeoffs.
• Experience with CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code.
• Ability to write/review code and troubleshoot application and infrastructure issues.
• Strong system-design and architecture skills with the ability to explain why a particular architecture or service was selected.
• Strong communication skills and ability to lead technical discussions with both engineers and client stakeholders.

Preferred

• Python, Java, Go, Node.js or similar backend development experience.
• Cloud Run, GKE/Kubernetes, Functions and/or similar compute platforms.
• Pub/Sub or other event-driven architecture experience.
• SQL and NoSQL database experience.
• Terraform.
• Experience with Vertex AI/Gemini or AI-enabled applications is a plus, but this is not primarily an AI-specialist role.

What We’re Looking For

We want someone who can design, build and lead.