Senior Associate - Google Cloud Lead Engineer

Google Cloud Lead Engineer

New York Life is seeking an experienced Google Cloud Lead Engineer to drive enterprise-scale cloud architecture, modernization, and operational excellence across our Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environment. This senior technical leader will shape cloud strategy, establish engineering standards, and guide teams in building secure, scalable, and compliant cloud solutions.

This role is ideal for candidates who combine hands-on engineering depth with architectural leadership, strong communication skills, and a passion for enabling large-scale transformation within a regulated industry.

What You'll Do:

Cloud Architecture & Engineering

• Lead the design and implementation of enterprise-grade solutions on Google Cloud Platform.
• Develop and maintain cloud reference architectures and engineering standards aligned with NYL's security and regulatory requirements.
• Architect resilient, scalable, secure, cloud-native applications.
• Lead migration and modernization efforts, including re-platforming and application transformation.

Technical Leadership

• Act as the technical lead for cross-team GCP projects.
• Conduct architecture reviews, provide the best engineering practices, and guide solution design.
• Provide mentorship to engineers working within application, infrastructure, and platform teams.
• Act as the escalation point for complex cloud and infrastructure issues.

DevOps & Automation

• Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines using Harness CI/CD.
• Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform.
• Automate deployment, provisioning, monitoring, and operational workflows.
• Drive adoption of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices to reduce manual toil with templates for operational work and secure release practices.

Security, Governance & Compliance

• Ensure all solutions meet New York Life's standards for security, privacy, and regulatory compliance.
• Implement IAM, network security, encryption, and key-management best practices.
• Partner with enterprise security, risk, and compliance teams to ensure proposed technical solutions match with existing enterprise policies and guardrails.
• Establish and enforce guardrails for cost management and governance.

Platform & Services Management

• Lead the implementation and optimization of GCP services, including Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Storage.
• Account for any GCP implementation with MLOps and Agentic AI tools in Vertex AI
• Enhance observability through Cloud Monitoring and Logging and New Relic.
• Optimize performance, reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency across environments.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with product teams, architects, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into scalable cloud solutions.
• Contribute to cloud roadmaps, modernization strategies, and technology evaluations.
• Support proofs-of-concept and the adoption of emerging cloud capabilities.

What You'll Bring:

• A bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent relevant experience.
• 8+ years of software, cloud, or infrastructure engineering experience.
• 4+ years of hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform.
• Proven experience designing cloud-native and hybrid architectures.
• Expertise in: GCP core services and networking, Kubernetes (GKE) and containerization, CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform preferred), Python, Java, Go, or similar programming languages.
• Experience working in Agile/DevOps environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• GCP Professional certifications (Cloud Architect, DevOps Engineer, or Data Engineer).
• Experience in regulated industries such as insurance, financial services, or healthcare.
• Strong background in security, identity management, and compliance frameworks.
• Experience working in hybrid or multi-cloud environments such as integrating services and resources across GCP and AWS.
• Knowledge of SRE, observability, and reliability engineering.

Leadership & Core Competencies

• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Able to influence both technology and business teams.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities.
• Strategic thinker with a willingness to remain hands-on.
• Alignment with New York Life's values of integrity, humanity, and financial strength.