Lead GCP & AI Engineer

Lead Cloud Engineer Contract | £800 per Day Google Cloud | Platform Engineering | AI/Agentic Infrastructure | iGaming We’re partnering with a leading technology consultancy to appoint an experienced Lead Cloud Engineer for a high-profile engagement within the iGaming sector. This is a senior, hands-on technical leadership role combining cloud platform engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, software engineering and AI infrastructure. You’ll own the technical direction of the engagement, lead the engineers delivering it and help build secure, scalable and production-ready platforms within a highly regulated environment. The Opportunity As Lead Cloud Engineer, you’ll take ownership of the technical direction of a complex client engagement, working closely with senior engineering stakeholders to define standards, challenge existing approaches and ensure successful delivery. You’ll design and build modern Google Cloud platform foundations while also developing the infrastructure required to deploy and operate AI models and agents securely at scale. Key Responsibilities You’ll play a key role in shaping and delivering cloud and AI platform capability by: Building the underlying AI agent platform layer, including per-agent identity, centralised logging, guardrails, budget controls, governed model access and tool/MCP registries. Implementing responsible production AI practices including evaluation frameworks, prompt and model versioning, human-in-the-loop controls, lineage and explainability. Leading migrations of latency-sensitive and stateful workloads from legacy or on-premises environments into Google Cloud. Owning platform reliability through SLOs, error budgets, multi-region architecture, disaster recovery, load testing, chaos testing and incident response. Designing cost-efficient cloud architectures through right-sizing, committed-use discounts, Spot capacity, GPU scheduling and detailed run-cost forecasting. Ensuring infrastructure, configuration and platform changes are managed as code. Contributing to technical proposals, pre-sales scoping and architecture reviews with clients. About You You’ll be a senior Cloud or Platform Engineer with a strong combination of Google Cloud, Kubernetes, software engineering, SRE, data engineering and production AI experience. The ideal profile will demonstrate a hybrid skill set across approximately 40% Cloud/Platform/SRE, 30% Software Engineering & AI and 30% Data Engineering, with security, governance, observability and cost management embedded throughout. You will also have: Cloud & Platform Engineering Advanced experience with Google Cloud Platform. Strong Infrastructure as Code expertise using Terraform, with exposure to tools such as Infrastructure Manager, Config Connector or Helm. Strong understanding of resilience, disaster recovery, SLOs, error budgets and highly available architectures. A strong FinOps and cost-optimisation mindset. Software Engineering, AI & Agentic Platforms Strong software-engineering principles across CI/CD pipelines, testing, linting, vulnerability scanning and automation. Production-level experience deploying and operating AI models and agents. Experience building shared platform capability supporting multiple agents, including identity, logging, guardrails, budget enforcement and governed model access. Exposure to platforms such as Amazon Bedrock, AWS AgentCore, Azure AI Studio or LangChain would be beneficial. Data Engineering Experience deploying and maintaining data orchestration platforms such as dbt or Apache Airflow. Experience with real-time streaming technologies such as Pub/Sub or Apache Kafka. Knowledge of vector databases and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures. Observability, Security & FinOps Experience implementing modern observability tooling such as Google Cloud Observability, Prometheus, Grafana and OpenTelemetry. Understanding of per-agent cost forecasting across tokens, tool calls, retries, storage and observability. Strong knowledge of platform security, software supply-chain security and secrets management. Sector & Consulting Experience Direct experience within iGaming would be highly advantageous. We’re also interested in candidates from other highly regulated, high-volume or latency-sensitive sectors such as: Financial Services Payments FinTech Trading Preferred Certifications Multiple professional-level certifications would be advantageous, including: Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Claude Certified Architect – Foundations AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert / AZ-305 Equivalent cloud, AI, Kubernetes or architecture certifications will also be considered. Why Apply? This is an excellent opportunity to lead the technical direction of a complex cloud and AI engagement within a highly regulated, technology-led environment. In return, you’ll benefit from: A senior technical leadership position with real ownership of architecture and engineering direction. The opportunity to work across advanced Google Cloud, Kubernetes and production AI platforms. Exposure to large-scale, high-availability and latency-sensitive environments. The opportunity to take emerging AI capability from prototype through to secure, governed production. A role combining hands-on engineering, architecture, technical leadership and client consulting. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. By applying you are confirming you are happy to be added to the Addition Solutions mailing list regarding future suitable positions. You can opt out of this at any time simply by contacting one of our consultants.