Senior Google Cloud Engineer Contractor

About the position Your work will change lives. Including your own. Your work will change lives. Including your own. Recursion is a clinical-stage TechBio company decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Central to its mission is the Recursion Operating System (OS), a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands one of the world’s largest proprietary biological, chemical, and patient-centric datasets. Reliable, secure Google Cloud infrastructure is essential so scientists, engineers, and clinical teams can move quickly with confidence—because patients are waiting. The Impact You’ll Make Design and run production-grade workloads on Google Cloud. You will own architectures and implementations that are secure by default, observable, cost-aware, and resilient to failure—so teams can ship quickly without trading off safety or uptime. Turn platform standards into everyday practice. You will define and implement patterns for identity, networking, data protection, secrets, and change management, and help product and data teams adopt them through tooling, documentation, and hands-on partnership. Operate what you build. You will troubleshoot incidents, drive root-cause learning, tune alerting and SLOs, and continuously improve backup, recovery, and capacity strategies for critical systems. Automate how change lands in production. You will create and evolve automated pipelines and workflows so infrastructure, releases, and operational tasks are repeatable, reviewable, and safe at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and maintain GCP services and supporting infrastructure (e.g., compute, storage, databases, messaging, serverless, Kubernetes) aligned with security and compliance requirements.
• Create, maintain, and improve automated pipelines and workflows using CI/CD tools to provision, test, and promote infrastructure and application changes with appropriate approvals, secrets handling, and rollback paths.
• 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; integrate with enterprise identity and key management where applicable.
• 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.

Nice-to-haves

• 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.

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