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Established in 1994, Alert IT Solutions, Inc. is a trusted leader providing specialized IT project resourcing, and consulting services to government agencies in the State of Illinois. With over 25 years of relevant experience in the Information Technology industry, Alert IT Solutions, Inc. has built enduring relationships with State of Illinois agencies.

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Title: Senior GCP Architect

Type: Contract

Client: State of Illinois 

Job Description:

The Senior GCP Architect is a key technical leader responsible for designing, architecting, and guiding the implementation of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) solutions for the organization’s Cloud Technology Program. This role will partner with engineering, security, operations, and business stakeholders to architect scalable, secure, cost-efficient, and high-performing cloud environments aligned with enterprise architecture and modernization goals. The Senior GCP Architect provides hands-on architecture leadership, technical direction, and governance ensuring that all cloud solutions follow industry best practices, GCP reference architectures, and organizational compliance requirements.

Key Responsibilities

• Design end-to-end GCP architectures for applications, data platforms, integration services, and cloud-native workloads.
• Define target-state architectures, cloud landing zones, VPC designs, IAM, networking, security controls, and resource hierarchies.
• Lead architecture decisions on compute, storage, networking, security, database, analytics, and DevOps capabilities.
• Serve as the primary GCP technical advisor and subject matter expert for the Cloud Technology Program.
• Provide guidance to engineering and development teams on cloud-native design patterns, modern application architectures, and migration strategies.
• Mentor cloud engineers, developers, and platform teams in GCP best practices and architectural standards.
• Evaluate application landscapes and recommend migration strategies: rehost, replatform, refactor, or rebuild.
• Lead modernization efforts into GCP using Kubernetes (GKE), serverless (Cloud Run, Cloud Functions), BigQuery, Pub/Sub, and other Google Cloud services.
• Define technical migration waves, patterns, and blueprints.
• Ensure architectures adhere to enterprise security, regulatory, and compliance frameworks.
• Implement identity, access management, encryption, network segmentation, and security baselines using GCP SCC, IAM, VPC-SC, and Cloud Armor.
• Partner with security teams to ensure secure-by-design principles.
• Architect CI/CD pipelines leveraging Cloud Build, Artifact Registry, GKE, GitOps, or Terraform.
• Drive automation using IaC (Terraform), automated policy enforcement, and configuration management tools.
• Define observability standards utilizing Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Trace, and error reporting.
• Recommend auto-scaling, caching, high-availability, backup, and DR architectures using GCP native capabilities.
• Perform cost modeling, budgeting, and optimization using GCP billing tools, quotas, and best practices.
• Monitor system performance and propose reliability improvements aligned with SRE practices.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 8–12+ years of experience in cloud architecture, with at least 4+ years specializing in GCP.
• Deep expertise in GCP services: GKE, Compute Engine, Cloud Run, BigQuery, Cloud SQL/Spanner, Pub/Sub, VPC, Cloud IAM, Cloud Storage, Cloud Build, and Operations Suite.
• Strong experience with network architecture, cloud security, IAM design, and landing zone implementation.
• Hands-on expertise with Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and automated cloud operations.
• Strong understanding of microservices, Kubernetes, container orchestration, and serverless architectures.
• Experience in cloud migration, modernization, and cloud-native solutioning.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.