Senior Google Cloud Engineer Contractor

Recursion Pharmaceuticals is a clinical-stage TechBio company focused on industrializing drug discovery. The Senior Google Cloud Engineer will design and run production-grade workloads on Google Cloud, ensuring secure, observable, and cost-aware architectures while mentoring engineers and collaborating with various teams.

Responsibilities:

• Design and run production-grade workloads on Google Cloud
• Own architectures and implementations that are secure by default, observable, cost-aware, and resilient to failure
• Define and implement patterns for identity, networking, data protection, secrets, and change management
• Troubleshoot incidents, drive root-cause learning, tune alerting and SLOs, and continuously improve backup, recovery, and capacity strategies for critical systems
• Create and evolve automated pipelines and workflows so infrastructure, releases, and operational tasks are repeatable, reviewable, and safe at scale
• Design, deploy, and maintain GCP services and supporting infrastructure (e.g., compute, storage, databases, messaging, serverless, Kubernetes)
• Create, maintain, and improve automated pipelines and workflows using CI/CD tools
• Implement Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and automated guardrails; review changes for risk and blast radius
• Engineer VPC design, private connectivity, firewall policies, and least-privilege IAM
• Build and improve monitoring, logging, tracing, and cost visibility
• Participate in incident response and post-incident reviews
• Partner with security, data, platform, and application teams to review designs, threat models, and operational readiness before go-live
• Mentor engineers on GCP best practices, operational excellence, and sustainable on-call practices

Requirements:

• 7+ years of professional experience designing, deploying, and supporting production systems in the cloud, with deep hands-on experience on Google Cloud Platform
• Hands-on experience designing, building, and operating automated pipelines and workflows with CI/CD tools (e.g., Cloud Build, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Argo CD, Jenkins, or comparable) in support of infrastructure and delivery
• A strong automation mindset: you treat automation as essential to how the environment is built and run, not an occasional add-on
• Strong proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform) and scripting/automation (e.g., Python or Go)
• Demonstrated expertise in core GCP building blocks: IAM, VPC/VPC Service Controls (as applicable), Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud DNS, GCS, Cloud SQL or comparable managed data services, logging/monitoring (Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring), and GKE or equivalent container operations
• Solid grasp of security fundamentals: least privilege, encryption at rest and in transit, secrets management, secure CI/CD, patch/version hygiene, and secure service-to-service communication
• Solid grasp of reliability fundamentals: SLOs/error budgets, graceful degradation, backups and restore drills, capacity planning, and incident management
• Collaborative problem solver: comfortable with ambiguity, strong written communication, and constructive code/design review
• Hands-on “doer” mindset: you both design and implement, and you care about maintainability and operability in production
• Professional Google Cloud certification (e.g., Professional Cloud Architect, Professional Cloud Security Engineer, Professional DevOps Engineer)
• Experience in regulated or high-assurance environments (e.g., healthcare, finance) and familiarity with audit and control expectations
• Experience with GxP systems and practices (e.g., GMP, GLP, GCP in the clinical/regulatory sense) in a validated or controlled IT context is a plus
• Experience with multi-project/folder/org governance, landing zones, or platform engineering patterns
• Experience with data-heavy workloads (BigQuery, Dataflow, batch/streaming pipelines) and their security and cost profiles