Lead GCP Platform Engineer – Disaster Recovery
Day Rate: £700 per day outside ir35
Contract: Initial 3 months, with potential to extend to 12+ months
Location: Fully remote, with 3–4 days onsite in North East England during the first week for onboarding. Very occasional onsite attendance may be required throughout the contract.
Start Date: ASAP (flexibility for candidates with up to four weeks’ notice)
The Opportunity
We are seeking an experienced Lead Platform Engineer or SRE with a strong background in disaster recovery, resilience engineering and cloud infrastructure to support a new GCP-based developer platform within a regulated financial services environment.
You will take ownership of the platform's disaster recovery strategy, addressing scenarios ranging from individual service failures to the complete loss of the GCP environment.
This is a hands-on role requiring someone who can work through ambiguity, assess technical options, build and test recovery approaches, and present clear recommendations to senior stakeholders. You will take existing work forward and establish a practical, evidence-based approach to resilience.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the disaster recovery workstream end to end, defining the problem, establishing a roadmap and driving delivery.
- Develop and validate recovery strategies for scenarios involving the complete loss of the GCP environment, including ransomware.
- Define backup, restore and recovery approaches for databases, Kafka, storage and secrets.
- Assess cross-cloud recovery options, including potential backup escrow or recovery capabilities using AWS.
- Build and automate full-environment recovery capabilities using GCP and Terraform.
- Establish scheduled and repeatable disaster recovery testing, with clear evidence suitable for regulatory review.
- Identify resilience gaps, evaluate options and make recommendations to technical leadership.
- Work with platform engineers and stakeholders to ensure recovery strategies are practical, testable and aligned with operational requirements.
Essential Experience
- Strong disaster recovery and resilience engineering experience within regulated financial services or similarly complex environments.
- Hands-on GCP and Terraform experience, including infrastructure rebuilds.
- Experience designing and implementing backup and restore strategies for databases and Kafka.
- Knowledge of secrets management and secure recovery approaches.
- Experience developing, automating and testing disaster recovery plans.
- Ability to take ownership, navigate ambiguity and drive technical decisions through to implementation.
- Strong stakeholder communication and the ability to explain complex technical risks and recommendations clearly.
Desirable Experience
- AWS and multi-cloud recovery strategies.
- Knowledge of UK operational resilience expectations and PRA/FCA requirements.
- Chaos engineering experience.
Ideal Candidate
You will be a senior hands-on engineer with proven ownership of disaster recovery and resilience initiatives in complex, regulated environments. You can move beyond documentation into practical implementation, testing and evidence, while confidently driving decisions and communicating risks to senior stakeholders.