First American - Principal Platform Engineer - Google Cloud Platform

Description :

Overview :

As a Principal Platform Engineer, you will define and drive the multi-year platform and infrastructure strategy for the organization. You will provide architectural leadership across cloud, infrastructure, and platform domains, ensuring scalability, reliability, and innovation across enterprise systems. This role requires a visionary engineer who can balance hands-on technical excellence with strategic foresight to guide modernization efforts and accelerate digital transformation.

What Youll Do :

- Set the multi-year platform and infrastructure strategy, ensuring alignment with enterprise goals and future technology trends.

- Drive organization-wide technical decisions, enabling scalable, secure, and resilient platforms that empower product and engineering teams.

- Lead the design and implementation of cloud-native architectures leveraging GCP, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure-as-Code principles.

- Provide architectural governance, establishing and evolving standards, patterns, and frameworks for platform engineering.

- Anticipate emerging trends in cloud infrastructure, AI, and DevSecOps, incorporating them into the platform roadmap.

Enterprise Collaboration & Influence :

- Partner with engineering, architecture, security, and operations leaders to define a unified platform vision and accelerate cloud adoption.

- Act as a trusted advisor to senior leadership, translating business goals into actionable technology strategies.

- Mentor and guide senior engineers and technical leads, fostering a culture of engineering excellence and continuous learning.

Quality, Security, and Reliability :

- Champion DevSecOps and shift-left methodologies to embed security, compliance, and testing throughout the delivery pipeline.

- Define and enforce cloud governance models, least-privilege IAM practices, and organization-wide security policies.

- Ensure adherence to industry standards and regulatory compliance frameworks, especially in financial or highly regulated environments.

Innovation & Continuous Improvement :

- Lead initiatives to modernize and optimize infrastructure, leveraging automation, observability, and AI-driven operational insights.

- Promote continuous improvement through data-driven decision-making, retrospectives, and proactive risk management.

- Drive adoption of AI and ML-based tooling to enhance software delivery, monitoring, and incident response.

What Youll Bring :

- Proven track record in setting and executing multi-year technology strategies that transform enterprise capabilities.

- Deep expertise in Google Cloud Platform (GCP)including Organizations, Projects, Networking, IAM, and cloud-native services.

- Advanced proficiency in Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Python, Go, Bash, gcloud CLI) and CI/CD automation using GitHub/GitLab/Azure DevOps.

- Expertise in container orchestration and serverless computing (Kubernetes, GKE, Cloud Run, Docker, App Engine).

- Strong command of networking, security, compliance, and cloud governance frameworks.

- Experience integrating AI/ML tools into platform pipelines and developer workflows.

- Strong communication and executive-level influence skillsable to drive consensus and lead through complexity.

- Experience in highly regulated industries such as Financial Services or Healthcare preferred.

Technical Skills :

- Automation & IaC : Terraform, Python, Go, Bash, Powershell, gcloud CLI.

- CI/CD Pipelines : GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps.

- Security & Compliance : Prisma Cloud, Checkov, Cloud Custodian, Open Policy Agent, shift-left and DevSecOps practices.

- Systems & Networking : Advanced knowledge in Linux, Windows, and hybrid networking.

- Architecture : Strong understanding of distributed systems, platform observability, and cost optimization