Senior Google Cloud Engineer Contractor

Your work will change lives. Including your own. 

Your work will change lives. Including your own.

Recursion is a clinical-stage TechBio company decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Central to its mission is the Recursion Operating System (OS), a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands one of the world’s largest proprietary biological, chemical, and patient-centric datasets. Reliable, secure Google Cloud infrastructure is essential so scientists, engineers, and clinical teams can move quickly with confidence—because patients are waiting.

The Impact You’ll Make

• Design and run production-grade workloads on Google Cloud. You will own architectures and implementations that are secure by default, observable, cost-aware, and resilient to failure—so teams can ship quickly without trading off safety or uptime.
• Turn platform standards into everyday practice. You will define and implement patterns for identity, networking, data protection, secrets, and change management, and help product and data teams adopt them through tooling, documentation, and hands-on partnership.
• Operate what you build. You will troubleshoot incidents, drive root-cause learning, tune alerting and SLOs, and continuously improve backup, recovery, and capacity strategies for critical systems.
• Automate how change lands in production. You will create and evolve automated pipelines and workflows so infrastructure, releases, and operational tasks are repeatable, reviewable, and safe at scale.

In this role, you will:

• Design, deploy, and maintain GCP services and supporting infrastructure (e.g., compute, storage, databases, messaging, serverless, Kubernetes) aligned with security and compliance requirements.
• Create, maintain, and improve automated pipelines and workflows using CI/CD tools to provision, test, and promote infrastructure and application changes with appropriate approvals, secrets handling, and rollback paths.
• Implement Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and automated guardrails; review changes for risk and blast radius.
• Engineer VPC design, private connectivity, firewall policies, and least-privilege IAM; integrate with enterprise identity and key management where applicable.
• Build and improve monitoring, logging, tracing, and cost visibility; participate in incident response and post-incident reviews.
• Partner with security, data, platform, and application teams to review designs, threat models, and operational readiness before go-live.
• Mentor engineers on GCP best practices, operational excellence, and sustainable on-call practices.

The Team You’ll Join

You will join IT Infrastructure and Enterprise Applications Engineering team based in Salt Lake City, working alongside colleagues in Eng Infra, Data Platform, Security, and business-facing engineering groups. This team designs, deploys, and supports the GCP environment that powers business solutions in the cloud—from core services and integrations to the operational practices that keep production dependable.

The Experience You’ll Need

• 7+ years of professional experience designing, deploying, and supporting production systems in the cloud, with deep hands-on experience on Google Cloud Platform.
• Hands-on experience designing, building, and operating automated pipelines and workflows with CI/CD tools (e.g., Cloud Build, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Argo CD, Jenkins, or comparable) in support of infrastructure and delivery.
• A strong automation mindset: you treat automation as essential to how the environment is built and run, not an occasional add-on.
• Strong proficiency in Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform) and scripting/automation (e.g., Python or Go).
• Demonstrated expertise in core GCP building blocks: IAM, VPC/VPC Service Controls (as applicable), Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud DNS, GCS, Cloud SQL or comparable managed data services, logging/monitoring (Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring), and GKE or equivalent container operations.
• Solid grasp of security fundamentals: least privilege, encryption at rest and in transit, secrets management, secure CI/CD, patch/version hygiene, and secure service-to-service communication.
• Solid grasp of reliability fundamentals: SLOs/error budgets, graceful degradation, backups and restore drills, capacity planning, and incident management.
• Collaborative problem solver: comfortable with ambiguity, strong written communication, and constructive code/design review.
• Hands-on “doer” mindset: you both design and implement, and you care about maintainability and operability in production.

Our Tech Stack

While we require the core competencies above, you will work directly with our environment, including:

• Cloud: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), GCS, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, and related services as adopted by platform teams
• IaC & delivery: Terraform; CI/CD and workflow automation (e.g., Argo and adjacent tooling used at Recursion) for pipelines that deploy and validate changes
• Data & orchestration: Kubernetes, PostgreSQL; alignment with data platform patterns (e.g., dbt, Prefect, Argo Workflows) where your work touches shared infrastructure
• Observability & ops: Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring; additional tooling as used by the organization

Nice to Haves

• Professional Google Cloud certification (e.g., Professional Cloud Architect, Professional Cloud Security Engineer, Professional DevOps Engineer).
• Experience in regulated or high-assurance environments (e.g., healthcare, finance) and familiarity with audit and control expectations.
• Experience with GxP systems and practices (e.g., GMP, GLP, GCP in the clinical/regulatory sense) in a validated or controlled IT context is a plus.
• Experience with multi-project/folder/org governance, landing zones, or platform engineering patterns.
• Experience with data-heavy workloads (BigQuery, Dataflow, batch/streaming pipelines) and their security and cost profiles.

**Please Note: This is a 5 Month contractor role**

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The Values We Hope You Share:

• We act boldly with integrity. We are unconstrained in our thinking, take calculated risks, and push boundaries, but never at the expense of ethics, science, or trust. 
• We care deeply and engage directly. Caring means holding a deep sense of responsibility and respect - showing up, speaking honestly, and taking action.
• We learn actively and adapt rapidly. Progress comes from doing. We experiment, test, and refine, embracing iteration over perfection.
• We move with urgency because patients are waiting. Speed isn’t about rushing but about moving the needle every day.
• We take ownership and accountability. Through ownership and accountability, we enable trust and autonomy—leaders take accountability for decisive action, and teams own outcomes together. 
• We are One Recursion. True cross-functional collaboration is about trust, clarity, humility, and impact. Through sharing, we can be greater than the sum of our individual capabilities.

Our values underpin the employee experience at Recursion. They are the character and personality of the company demonstrated through how we communicate, support one another, spend our time, make decisions, and celebrate collectively.

More About Recursion

Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX) is a clinical-stage TechBio company decoding biology to radically improve lives. Recursion is advancing a portfolio of differentiated investigational medicines across its wholly owned and partnered pipeline in oncology, rare disease, neuroscience, immunology, and other therapeutic areas with significant unmet need. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, an AI-native, end-to-end drug discovery and development platform integrating biology, chemistry, and clinical development into a unified intelligence system. Powered by proprietary multimodal data, purpose-built AI models, and bilingual teams fluent in both science and AI, the Recursion OS is designed to translate complex science into medicines that matter — faster, better, and at scale — for patients who are waiting.

Recursion’s platform infrastructure is anchored in Salt Lake City, Utah and Milton Park, Oxfordshire, where its automated biology and chemistry laboratories generate proprietary data at industrial scale. Recursion also maintains offices in New York, Montréal, and London, three global hubs for talent and leadership at the intersection of AI and scientific innovation. Learn more at www.recursion.com, or connect on X and LinkedIn.

Recursion is an Equal Opportunity Employer.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal, state, local, or provincial human rights legislation. 

Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.

Recruitment & Staffing Agencies: Recursion Pharmaceuticals and its affiliate companies do not accept resumes from any source other than candidates. The submission of resumes by recruitment or staffing agencies to Recursion or its employees is strictly prohibited unless contacted directly by Recursion’s internal Talent Acquisition team. Any resume submitted by an agency in the absence of a signed agreement will automatically become the property of Recursion, and Recursion will not owe any referral or other fees. Our team will communicate directly with candidates who are not represented by an agent or intermediary unless otherwise agreed to prior to interviewing for the job.