Sr Cloud Engineer | 6-month FTC

Craft:

Technology & Development

Job Description:

Are you inspired by the idea of delivering a smooth gaming experience to 260 million players?

We are hiring for a Senior Cloud Engineer to join the Cloud Platform Team! This is a 6-month FTC covering parental leave.

We are responsible for developing and maintaining the GKE Platform for all games at King. In our team, we focus on reliability, performance and scalability–our platform supports an average traffic of millions of requests per second from all our beloved games. We work closely with King’s teams to support game feature development, handle intense traffic events and highly concurrent data storage. In our daily work, we promote creativity and innovation by adopting the latest technologies and constantly improving and evolving our platform.

Shared Tech is the engine that powers all our live games. With the aim of providing the best possible experience for our developers and creators, as well as our hundreds of millions of players, our extensive team is integral to deliver King’s mission of Making the World Playful. Dedicated to keeping our talented game makers productive, we enable the Kingdom to create, build, launch and operate every King game, across a vast number of platforms and mobile devices. We are the stage where King games love to perform!

Your role within the Kingdom

• You’ll partner closely with game and platform teams to deploy games/services on our GKE platform via self-service capabilities, standard patterns, and guardrails that accelerate delivery while maintaining reliability and security
• Manage and optimize GKE clusters for high reliability, scalability, and efficiency
• Automate infrastructure provisioning with Terraform and Crossplane for repeatable deployments
• Design scalable systems for 260+ million players, ensuring performance and availability
• Oversee cloud networking (Shared VPC, Cloud Armor, Firewalls, BGP/peering, IPv6, Kubernetes networking, Cloud Router/Interconnect, VPN)
• Manage Istio service mesh, Google Cloud load balancing, and large-scale networks to support millions of requests/sec
• Manage cloud services (Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Secret Manager, Workload Identity, Spanner) for game teams
• Build/extend compute platforms and automation tools to streamline game backend operations
• Automate CI/CD with CloudBuild, Jenkins, Atlantis, ArgoCD for seamless deployments
• Implement security-first infrastructure to ensure stability and compliance
• Troubleshoot and resolve incidents to improve resilience and scalability
• Support the full game backend lifecycle, from initial deployment to high-traffic live operations
• Mentor engineers, lead critical projects, and foster an open, fun, and innovative culture

Skills to create thrills

• Cloud Networking: Expertise in BGP/peering, IPv6, Kubernetes networking, Cloud Router/Interconnect, VPN, NAT, BeyondCorp, IAP
• Kubernetes & Cloud: Hands-on GKE management, cluster optimization, scaling, and troubleshooting
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Expertise with Terraform and Crossplane for automating cloud infrastructure
• CI/CD & GitOps: Proficiency with Cloud Build, CloudBees CDRO, Jenkins, Atlantis, ArgoCD for automated deployments
• Monitoring & Observability: Experience with OTel, Grafana, Prometheus for full-stack visibility
• Cloud Resource Management: Experience managing Cloud SQL, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Secret Manager, Workload Identity
• Security & Governance: Deep understanding of cloud security, IAM, zero-trust networking, and secrets management
• Scalability & Resilience: Ability to design highly scalable, resilient game infrastructure with automation
• Troubleshooting & Reliability: Expertise in debugging distributed systems, finding root causes, and enhancing reliability
• Leadership & Collaboration: Excellent communication, mentoring, and cross-functional collaboration skills
• Passion for Gaming & Innovation: Eager to leverage cutting-edge cloud technology for gaming

Our award-winning culture and sweet benefits

What makes King a great place to work is our playful culture, work-life balance and a growth mindset focused on learning every day. And don’t just take our word for it

• we’ve featured in both Newsweek’s Most Loved Workplaces and the Sunday Times Best Places to Work.

Our sweet benefits and perks support you to get your best work done and have fun along the way. These include:

-Hybrid working: A Team First, Hybrid Working model that provides working patterns based on the needs of the team

• allowing time for connection, collaboration, and celebration, and helping Kingsters balance their personal and work lives. -Coverage for the important life stuff: The specifics vary location to location, but benefits may include private medical, dental, critical illness, and pension plans.-Generous holiday allowance: With additional close-down time off between 25th December and the New Year. -Inspiring workspaces: