We run our core platforms on Google Cloud, and demand for that platform is accelerating — most of our AI initiatives now depend on it. The team that builds and runs it has become one of the most critical, and most stretched, functions.
This is a genuine 2IC role: you will run the platform function day-to-day with real autonomy, make the architectural and delivery calls, and represent Cloud Technology so that leadership is freed from the detail and the platform stops being a bottleneck to progress.
We’re looking for a hands-on senior leader, someone with deep Google Cloud expertise and the judgement to lead without needing to be told what to do.
  
What you'll do:

• Own delivery, operations and decision-making across the platform with the autonomy to run things end-to-end and deputise in leadership forums.
• Set direction, make the calls, and unblock the team without escalating everything upward.
• Lead, grow and develop the platform engineering and SRE teams
• Re-shape the platform from a hands-on dependency into a self-service, paved-road capability, balancing new capability against reliability, security and technical debt
• Drive platform throughput and developer experience
• Make the platform the accelerant for AI initiatives: ensure the underlying GCP capabilities (Vertex AI, GKE, data/feature platforms, accelerators/GPU, MLOps tooling) are available, secure, scalable and easy to consume.
• Partner with AI/ML and data teams to remove platform dependencies from their critical path.
• Set the technical direction for the GCP platform: GKE, networking, IAM/identity, data services, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).
• Drive security-by-default and cloud security posture in partnership with security teams.
• Own cloud cost efficiency (FinOps): make consumption visible, efficient and predictable as scale grows.
• Be the trusted, senior point of contact for product, engineering, AI/ML, risk and security teams that depend on the platform.
• Communicate platform strategy, trade-offs and roadmap credibly to both engineers and senior business stakeholders.

  
What we need:
Essential:

• Deep, hands-on GCP experience, architecting and operating production workloads at scale (GKE, networking, IAM, data services, infrastructure-as-code).
• A track record of leading platform / cloud / infrastructure engineering teams, with the seniority and judgement to run a function with minimal oversight.
• Demonstrated experience turning an in-demand platform team into a scalable, self-service capability (platform engineering, paved roads, developer experience).
• SLOs, observability, incident management, and operating critical production systems.
• Excellent infrastructure-as-code and automation practice (Terraform, CI/CD, Git Ops).
• The leadership maturity to make decisions, hold priorities, develop people, and represent the team to senior stakeholders.
• Clear, credible communication with both deeply technical and senior business audiences.

Nice to have:

• Experience enabling AI/ML workloads on GCP (Vertex AI, GPU/ accelerator infrastructure, feature/data platforms, ML Ops).
• Multi-cloud or hybrid exposure.
• Google Professional Cloud Architect / Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer certification, or equivalent.

  
 If this role looks like you, apply now or reach out to Oliver on  oliver@preactarecruitment.com or 0455 198 736

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