Strategic Cloud Engineer – GCP Platform & FinOps

We are seeking a Strategic Cloud Engineer to operate at the intersection of
GCP FinOps (cost optimisation)
,
Kubernetes platform engineering
,
operational excellence
and
agentic-AI-driven development
.
This is a high-leverage engineering role responsible for optimising cloud spend, increasing platform reliability, and accelerating engineering output through automation and AI-assisted workflows. You will work across GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform and modern AI-assisted development environments. The environment is a high-scale, regulated, multi-product SaaS platform.
What you'll own
GCP cost optimisation & FinOps
— rightsizing, autoscaling and workload efficiency; cost-observability dashboards (Grafana / BigQuery / billing exports); partnering with engineering teams to architect cost-efficient solutions
Kubernetes platform operations (GKE / multi-cluster)
— cluster lifecycle, upgrades, node pools and scaling; ingress and domain routing; secrets, environment variables and service deployments; multi-tenant SaaS customer lifecycle events
Infrastructure as code & automation
— own and evolve Terraform provisioning; support and optimise GitLab CI/CD rollout pipelines; automate customer provisioning and environment configuration
Platform services & observability
— VictoriaMetrics, StatsD, Grafana, Google Cloud Monitoring, Elasticsearch / OpenSearch, Apache Airflow; troubleshooting distributed systems and production incidents
Global operations & reliability
— instance provisioning and decommissioning, domain mapping, infrastructure support across providers including Hetzner, and participation in an on-call rotation
Agentic-AI engineering enablement
— using AI-assisted tools (Cursor, OpenCode, multi-model AI development workflows) to accelerate infrastructure development, automate operational runbooks, and improve debugging of CI/CD pipelines and distributed systems
Core technical requirements
Strong expertise in Google Cloud Platform
— GKE, Compute Engine, IAM, networking
Proven experience with
Terraform
in production environments
3+ years managing production Kubernetes
— cluster lifecycle and upgrades, ingress / reverse-proxy configuration, secrets and configuration management
Demonstrated ability to optimise cloud spend in production
— cost allocation and usage patterns, rightsizing and scaling strategies, and building cost-visibility dashboards
GitLab CI/CD (preferred) or GitHub Actions, with the ability to debug pipelines and support release workflows
Grafana / VictoriaMetrics / StatsD / Google Cloud Monitoring; Elasticsearch / OpenSearch; Apache Airflow / Airbyte / n8n
Scripting in Python, Bash or similar
Agentic AI development (required baseline)
— working familiarity with AI-native IDEs such as Cursor and agent-based development environments, and the ability to use AI to generate, review and optimise infrastructure code
Nice to have
Multi-cloud exposure (AWS / Azure)
Experience in regulated environments (SOC 2, ISO)
Exposure to European infrastructure providers (Hetzner)
Experience building internal developer platforms (IDP)