Senior Platform Engineer - Google Cloud Platform

Candescent is a forward-thinking technology company transforming how financial institutions deliver Intelligent Banking experiences. We unite digital banking, account opening, and branch solutions that power and connect digital banking, account opening, and branch solutions—creating seamless engagement across digital, remote, and in-person channels.

Our Experience-Led, Intelligence-Driven approach combines human-centered design with data, automation, and cloud-based innovation. Built on an API-first architecture, our extensible ecosystem enables institutions to adapt quickly, integrate easily, and unlock new opportunities for growth—turning every customer interaction into a moment of clarity, confidence, and connection.

Role Summary 

We are looking for a strong Senior Platform Engineer to design, build, and evolve the enterprise platform that serves as the foundation for engineering teams across the company.

Leveraging GCP, Kubernetes/GKE, Terraform, GitOps, and automation, you will build scalable, secure, reliable, and reusable platform capabilities that accelerate software delivery, simplify operations, and provide a consistent developer experience.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on platform engineer who can take ownership from design through production, solve complex technical problems, establish engineering standards, and work across teams to improve the overall platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate scalable, secure, highly available, and reliable GCP platform capabilities. 

• Build and evolve production Kubernetes/GKE platforms supporting business-critical workloads. 

• Develop reusable platform capabilities, standards, and patterns that enable engineering teams to deploy and operate workloads consistently. 

• Build and manage infrastructure using Terraform and Infrastructure as Code, with a focus on repeatability and maintainability. 

• Implement and improve GitOps and CI/CD practices, using tools such as ArgoCD and other CI/CD platforms. 

• Develop automation using Python, Shell, or similar technologies to reduce manual operational work. 

• Design and implement GCP networking, IAM, compute, storage, load balancing, and security patterns that support application and platform workloads. 

• Troubleshoot complex production issues across GCP, Kubernetes, networking, infrastructure, and platform services. 

• Improve platform reliability, scalability, performance, security, and operational efficiency. 

• Build platform standards and self-service capabilities that improve the developer experience and reduce operational dependencies. 

• Participate in architecture and design reviews and provide technical guidance on platform engineering decisions. 

• Partner closely with Application, SRE, DevOps, Security, and Architecture teams to understand requirements and deliver platform capabilities. 

• Lead or participate in major incident response, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement initiatives. 

• Mentor engineers and contribute to engineering standards, technical practices, and knowledge sharing. 

Must-Have Skills & Experience 

• 10+ years of experience in Platform Engineering, Cloud Engineering, DevOps, SRE, or a similar engineering role. 

• Strong hands-on experience designing and operating GCP production environments. 

• Strong production experience with Kubernetes/GKE. 

• Strong experience with Terraform and Infrastructure as Code. 

• Hands-on experience with CI/CD and GitOps-based deployment practices. 

• Strong understanding of GCP and cloud fundamentals, including: 

• Networking 

• IAM and access control 

• Compute 

• Storage 

• Load balancing 

• Security 

• Experience building and operating highly available and scalable platforms. 

• Strong production troubleshooting and problem-solving skills across cloud and Kubernetes environments. 

• Experience developing automation using Python, Shell, or similar scripting languages. 

• Experience taking ownership of platform capabilities from design and implementation through production operations. 

• Strong understanding of platform reliability, security, scalability, and operational excellence. 

• Strong communication and collaboration skills with the ability to influence technical decisions across teams. 

• Demonstrated technical leadership and ability to mentor engineers. 

GCP & Kubernetes 

• Strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform in production. 

• Strong experience operating Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) in production. 

• Good understanding of GCP services and concepts relevant to platform engineering, including: 

• VPC and networking 

• IAM 

• Compute Engine 

• Cloud Storage 

• Load Balancing 

• Cloud DNS 

• Secret Manager 

• Cloud Monitoring 

• Experience with Kubernetes concepts including workload management, networking, ingress, resource management, scaling, upgrades, and troubleshooting. 

• Ability to understand and troubleshoot issues across the GCP → GKE → workload stack. 

Infrastructure as Code & Automation 

• Strong experience using Terraform to provision and manage cloud infrastructure. 

• Experience managing infrastructure through version-controlled repositories and automated workflows. 

• Understanding of Terraform modules, state management, dependencies, and lifecycle management. 

• Ability to develop reusable infrastructure patterns and automation. 

• Strong focus on eliminating manual operational processes through automation. 

Platform Engineering & Developer Experience 

• Experience building reusable platform capabilities that can be consumed by multiple engineering teams. 

• Ability to establish standardized patterns and guardrails without unnecessarily restricting development teams. 

• Understanding of developer experience and the challenges application teams face when consuming cloud platforms. 

• Experience improving deployment workflows, platform usability, and operational consistency. 

• Exposure to self-service platform capabilities is highly valuable. 

• Ability to reduce operational dependencies and enable engineering teams to become more self-sufficient. 

Preferred Skills & Experience 

• Experience operating enterprise-scale or multi-team GCP environments. 

• Experience developing reusable Terraform modules, platform frameworks, or shared infrastructure capabilities. 

• Advanced GKE/Kubernetes platform engineering experience. 

• Experience with GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar CI/CD platforms. 

• Experience with ArgoCD, FluxCD, or other GitOps technologies. 

• Experience implementing platform security, governance, and compliance controls. 

• Experience with GCP services such as Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Memorystore, Artifact Registry, KMS, or similar services. 

• Experience with cloud migration or application modernization initiatives. 

• Experience working with distributed systems, microservices, and cloud-native architectures. 

• Experience working in financial services or other regulated environments. 

What We Value 

• Platform ownership — take responsibility for capabilities from design through production. 

• Engineering mindset — build scalable and maintainable solutions rather than one-off fixes. 

• Automation-first thinking — reduce manual work and operational toil. 

• Strong focus on reliability, security, scalability, and simplicity. 

• Ability to solve complex production problems and drive issues through to resolution. 

• Ability to design standards and reusable capabilities that work across multiple engineering teams. 

• Strong collaboration and ability to influence without direct authority. 

• Focus on improving the developer experience and making the platform easier to consume. 

• Willingness to mentor engineers and raise the technical maturity of the team. 

• Curiosity and continuous learning, particularly as GCP and cloud-native technologies evolve. 

Statement to Third Party Agencies
To ALL recruitment agencies: Candescent only accepts resumes from agencies on the preferred supplier list. Please do not forward resumes to our applicant tracking system, Candescent employees, or any Candescent facility. Candescent is not responsible for any fees or charges associated with unsolicited resumes.