GCP Cloud Engineer

GCP Cloud Engineer

VA Cloud Operations & Migration Services (COMS) — OCI & GCP Support

Labor Category

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Tools Subject Matter Expert

$115,000-$150,000/ year | Remote

Clearance

U.S. citizen or Permanent Resident (3+ years in the U.S.); Public Trust (High-Risk) eligibility

About the Role

Kavant is seeking to fill a GCP Cloud Engineer position in support of VA (Veterans Affairs) Cloud Operations and Migration Services (COMS) capability to provide operational input and support for the operations, maintenance, and refinement of VA’s Enterprise Cloud (VAEC) environment, execution support for migrating new and legacy VA applications and services to cloud computing and continuous improvement of VA’s IT infrastructure. The candidate will support our VA clients in their cloud operations to enhance, optimize, and maintain their computing capabilities across their technical landscape. This includes working with our VA system admins when supporting application teams, working with project teams to operate & maintain (O&M) VA applications on their cloud platform. The GCP Cloud Engineer will be focused on, and must have expertise with, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) components, resources, services, and tools.

The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Engineer will support federal agency modernization by building, deploying, automating, and maintaining secure and efficient cloud environments.

What You'll Do

• Provide hands-on implementation and operational support for a variety of cloud projects.
• The engineer will leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform to create reusable modules and enforce secure configurations.
• Key responsibilities include hands-on work across compute, networking, security, and automation to ensure predictable, agency-aligned GCP operations that are compliant with federal frameworks.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or technical discipline (10 years additional work experience might be considered in lieu of a degree).
• Minimum of six (6) years setting up, configuring and using GCP cloud operational tools, ensuring service level agreements and performance targets are consistently met while maintaining compliance with all relevant policies, standards, and guidelines.
• Minimum of three (3) years of hands-on experience engineering GCP core services, including advanced troubleshooting skills across complex cloud systems, including infrastructure, networking, GKE, and CI/CD pipeline issues.
• Demonstrated hands-on experience engineering and managing core GCP services, including Compute Engine for various VMs operating both Linux (Red Hat) and Windows OS.
• Proven expertise in deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
• Experience deploying and maintaining serverless applications using Cloud Run, specifically for hosting Python-based routines and services.
• Proven ability to create and maintain critical technical documentation for a federal agency, including architecture diagrams, runbooks, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), and compliance artifacts.
• Advanced knowledge of GCP Identity and Access Management (IAM), with specific, hands-on experience administering IAM roles and policies associated with Workload Identity Federation (WIF) for secure, keyless authentication from external environments.
• Experience working within environments governed by federal frameworks and familiarity with common operational tools (e.g., VAECOT).
• Strong proficiency in building, deploying, and maintaining secure cloud environments using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), particularly with Terraform to create reusable modules.
• Experience developing and troubleshooting CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment, using tools such as Cloud Build, Github Actions.
• Candidate background eligibility requirements are United States citizen or be a Permanent Resident and have lived in the United States for at least 3 years, clean criminal background and able to obtain a Public Trust (High-Risk) Position.

Preferred Qualifications

• Active clearance for Public Trust (High-Risk) Position
• Current GCP certification or a recent passing exam (e.g., GCP Associate Cloud Engineer or Professional Cloud Engineer certification)
• Previous Federal Government experience, preferably at VA
• Knowledge of regulated environments (FedRAMP, HIPAA, PCI, NIST 800-53, CIS benchmarks).
• Hands-on engineering of core GCP services, includes compute, storage, networking, and identity management. Experience with either AWS, Azure, or Oracle is also desired.
• Experience with multi-cloud tooling
• Understanding of cloud boundary protections, segmentation, zero trust principles, and secure data flow requirements in federal environments.
• Experience creating, testing, and maintaining virtual machine images
• Experience deploying, maintaining, and optimizing container technologies, such as Kubernetes
• OS-administration skills on assessing and troubleshooting application performance, remediation of vulnerability scans
• Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) certification or ITIL knowledge
• Data Management skills applicable to prepare, store, and process data for AI applications, including Cloud Storage for unstructured data (images, documents) and BigQuery for large-scale structured data and analytics.
• Experience leveraging pre-trained APIs for common AI tasks

VAEC Operational Tools (VAECOT)

GCP Cloud Service Provider (CSP) Operational Tools/Services

• Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Cloud Run
• Security: IAM, Secret Manager, Cloud KMS, Security Center, VPC Service Controls, Binary Authorization
• Hands-on engineering of core cloud services, especially on GCP. This includes compute, storage, networking, and identity management. Experience with AWS, Azure, or Oracle is also desired.
• Proficiency in managing VMs (Linux/Red Hat, Windows), containerized workloads with GKE and Red Hat OpenShift, and serverless applications using Cloud Run with Python.
• Expertise in automating environment builds and configurations using Terraform.
• Skill in developing and troubleshooting CI/CD pipelines using tools like Cloud Build, GitLab CI, or Jenkins.
• Deep knowledge of cloud security principles and tools. Crucially, this includes hands-on administration of custom IAM roles and policies, associated with Workload Identity Federation (WIF) SSO.
• Strong understanding of cloud networking architecture, including VPC, DNS, Load Balancing, Hybrid Connectivity, and network security services (Firewalls, IDS).
• Ability to implement and manage comprehensive monitoring, logging, and tracing for cloud services.
• Proven ability to produce technical documentation, including architecture diagrams, runbooks, and compliance artifacts.
• Some experience working within environments governed by federal frameworks and familiarity with common operational tools (VAECOT):
• Security: Tenable Nessus, CrowdStrike, Armis, Centrify, BigFix, NetSkope
• Observability: Splunk, Dynatrace, SolarWinds
• Service Management: ServiceNow, Jira
• Governance & Reporting: Turbot, Apptio, Cloudability

Hands-on with DevOps & Automation tools

• IaC: Terraform
• CI/CD: Cloud Build, GitLab CI, Jenkins
• Configuration Management: Ansible
• Source Control: GitHub

Work Location

Remote

Pay: $130,000.00 - $150,000.00 per year

Benefits

• 401(k)
• 401(k) matching
• Flexible schedule
• Paid time off
• Retirement plan

Work Location: Remote