Practice Leader - Cloud & Platform Engineering (GCP)

Practice Leader - Cloud & Platform Engineering (GCP) Start Date: Immediate Position Type: Contract / Full-time Employment Location: Remote across Canada / USA The Practice Leader Platform Engineering is a strategic and delivery-oriented leader who drives the execution of the practice's goals through effective leadership, project oversight, and cross-functional collaboration. Reporting to the Practice Director, this role is responsible for translating the practice's strategic vision into actionable plans, ensuring successful project delivery, and advancing the platform engineering horizontal across client engagements. This individual will serve as the key authority on implementation approaches, technical strategy, and team enablement, ensuring solutions are aligned with both client objectives and modern platform engineering best practices. The Practice Leader works closely with architects, engineers, and engagement teams to ensure consistency, quality, and scalability of solutions, while also supporting pre-sales, business development, and service offering innovation. Key Responsibilities Strategic & Operational Leadership • Translate the practice's strategic goals into actionable delivery plans that drive value for clients and internal stakeholders. • Collaborate with the Practice Director to define and evolve the long-term vision and maturity roadmap for the Platform Engineering practice. • Lead the development and enhancement of platform engineering service offerings, frameworks, and reusable patterns. Project Delivery Leadership • Own the delivery success of client engagements, ensuring alignment to scope, timelines, budgets, and expected outcomes. • Provide technical leadership and direction to delivery teams across multiple engagements. • Drive adoption of standardized delivery approaches, agile methodologies, and best-in-class automation practices in line with platform engineering principles. • Ensure client satisfaction through high-quality execution and proactive stakeholder engagement. Team Leadership & Enablement • Serve as a functional and project-based reporting manager for architects, platform engineers, and DevOps specialists. • Provide mentorship, coaching, and technical guidance to team members to enable skills growth and delivery excellence. • Define and promote standards around platform architecture, environment automation, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD, GitOps, Container platforms, and observability/SRE. Implementation Approach & Platform Engineering Oversight • Define and enforce implementation approaches for platform engineering initiatives such as internal developer platforms, environment vending, policy as code, and infrastructure lifecycle management. • Serve as a thought leader in cloud-native design, platform automation, developer self-service models, and security-integrated pipelines. • Oversee the design and execution of horizontal platform components that span multiple product and service delivery teams. Pre-Sales & Business Development • Collaborate with sales and solution teams to shape client proposals, including scope definition, effort estimation, and delivery strategy. • Represent platform engineering capabilities in client discussions, RFPs, and strategic planning sessions. Practice Maturity & Innovation • Drive internal process improvements and implementation of delivery accelerators (e.g., blueprints, templates, reusable modules). • Stay abreast of industry trends and emerging technologies; assess and incorporate them into delivery methodologies and service offerings. Qualifications • 15+ years of experience in technology consulting or delivery, with at least 10 years in platform engineering, DevOps, or cloud architecture leadership roles. • Proven track record of leading multi-disciplinary teams and managing large-scale technology implementations. • Deep experience with cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure), Kubernetes, IaC (Terraform, Pulumi), CI/CD, GitOps (e.g., ArgoCD, Flux), Linux, and observability tooling. • Strong understanding of developer productivity platforms, internal developer portals, and platform-as-a-product thinking. • Experience working in Agile/DevOps environments with a strong focus on automation and repeatability. • Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills. • Prior experience in pre-sales, proposal development, and client-facing solutioning. Seniority Level: Director Employment Type: Contract Job Function: Other Industries: IT Services and IT Consulting Apply tot his job