GCP Migration Expert

Position Title:GCP Migration Expert
Location:St. Louis ON SITE
Duration:Long Term Contract
Job description:
We are looking for a GCP Migration Expert to lead the planning and execution of migrating applications, data, and infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform. The ideal candidate owns migration strategy end-to-end — assessment, landing zone design, migration execution, and post-migration optimization — delivering secure, cost-effective, and performant cloud environments.
 
Basic Qualifications:

• Overall, 15 years of experience, with 5 years in cloud technologies.
• 5 years in cloud architecture/engineering, with proven experience leading migrations to GCP.

• Deep GCP knowledge: Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, VPC networking, Cloud IAM, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL/Spanner, BigQuery.
• Strong Kubernetes and GKE expertise: cluster administration, workloads/scheduling, networking (CNI/ingress), storage (CSI), autoscaling (HPA/VPA/Cluster Autoscaler), RBAC, and Helm — including migrating containerized workloads onto GKE.
• Containerization skills: Docker, image optimization, and refactoring applications for Kubernetes.
• Hands-on with GCP migration tooling: Migration Center, Migrate to Virtual Machines, Migrate to Containers, Database Migration Service, Datastream, Transfer Service.
• Strong grasp of migration strategy frameworks (6 R's) and large-scale cutover planning.
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform (and/or Deployment Manager/Config Connector).
• Networking and hybrid connectivity: Cloud Interconnect, VPN, Shared VPC, DNS, load balancing.
• Security and governance: IAM, organization policies, VPC Service Controls, KMS, compliance.
• Experience with cost optimization (right-sizing, CUDs/SUDs, billing analysis).
• Strong understanding of source environments (on-prem VMware, AWS, or Azure) to plan accurate migrations.

• Google Cloud certifications: Professional Cloud Architect, Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, or Professional Cloud Network Engineer.
• Advanced GKE/Kubernetes operations: service mesh (Istio/ASM), multi-cluster, and Anthos.
• Data warehouse modernization (Teradata/Oracle/Hadoop to BigQuery) experience.
• CI/CD and GitOps on GCP (Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy, Argo CD).
• Anthos / multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud experience.

• Lead end-to-end cloud migration programs to GCP (assessment, strategy, execution, validation, optimization).
• Assess existing on-premises/other-cloud workloads and define the right migration pattern per application (rehost, replatform, refactor, repurchase, retire, retain — the 6 R's).
• Design GCP landing zones, organization/project hierarchy, networking (VPC, interconnect, peering), and IAM/security guardrails.
• Plan and execute database and data migrations (Cloud SQL, Spanner, BigQuery, Datastream, Database Migration Service).
• Migrate compute workloads (Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, App Engine) with minimal downtime using tools like Migrate to Virtual Machines / Migrate to Containers.
• Containerize and migrate workloads to Kubernetes/GKE: cluster design, workload modernization, Helm/manifests, networking, autoscaling, and migration of existing clusters (self-managed or other-cloud) to GKE.
• Define cutover plans, rollback strategies, and parity/validation testing to de-risk migrations.
• Optimize cost, performance, and reliability post-migration (right-sizing, committed-use discounts, autoscaling).
• Collaborate with application, security, and networking teams, document architecture and runbooks.