Senior Cloud Engineering Lead

ROLE SUMMARY

At the heart of Pfizer's Digital transformation sits Global Cloud Services, enabling modern cloud infrastructure and engineering capabilities that influence business outcomes and provide value to our business, shareholders, and patients every day.

We are seeking a Senior Cloud Engineering Lead to join our growing team at Pfizer's Digital hub in New York, NY, United States. This role requires a strategic technical leader with deep expertise in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), a strong emphasis on security, automation, and infrastructure as code. The ideal candidate will bring a hands-on approach using modern engineering practices and a proven track record in leading and mentoring technical teams.

Pfizer seeks individuals that are highly self-motivated, eager to learn, and effective when working in a team environment. A strong aptitude towards self-development, continuous learning, and growth is highly desired.

ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES

The Senior Cloud Engineering Lead provides technical leadership and design expertise, playing a key role in ensuring Pfizer Digital continues to leverage cloud-native design patterns and modern engineering practices. This role will help ensure our Cloud Engineering team delivers a secure, compliant, productive, and innovative GCP hosting environment on a global scale.

• Lead a small technical team of 3–5 cloud engineers, providing guidance, mentorship, and support in their professional development while driving the adoption of modern cloud engineering practices across the organization.
• Lead the design, implementation, and management of GCP solutions focusing on security, scalability, and automation.
• Drive the adoption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices using Terraform, OpenTofu, Spacelift, and Python/Pulumi to ensure efficient and repeatable deployment of cloud resources.
• Manage and mentor a team of 3–5 cloud engineers, providing technical leadership, coaching, and support in their professional development.
• Create modern GCP cloud design patterns and help drive consumption of reusable patterns through partnership with development teams.
• Collaborate with global cloud engineers, developers, and product teams to build GCP cloud-native capabilities for Pfizer Digital.
• Design and architect standards for the deployment and management of GCP infrastructure.
• Serve as escalation point for operational issues, supporting the on-call engineering team when needed (minimal operational responsibilities, <5% of time).
• Stay updated with the latest GCP technology, security trends, and engineering practices to keep our infrastructure modern and ahead of potential threats.
• Ensure continuous improvement initiatives are identified, prioritized, and addressed within the cloud environment.
• Champion automation-first approaches across all cloud engineering activities.
• Work in a cross-functional, global engineering team while creating and evolving internal engineering standards.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a similar discipline.
• Applicant must have a bachelor's degree with at least 6+ years of experience; OR a master's degree with at least 5+ years of experience; OR a PhD with 1+ years of experience in cloud engineering or infrastructure roles
• At least 2 years of experience in a technical leadership role, managing or leading engineering teams.
• Deep expertise in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with demonstrated ability to design, build, and operate production-grade GCP environments.
• Strong experience building and deploying cloud infrastructure using industry-standard IaC tools such as Terraform, OpenTofu, or Pulumi.
• Proficiency in at least one major programming language (Python strongly preferred) for automation and tooling.
• Demonstrated ability to learn new technologies quickly and adapt to evolving cloud platforms.
• Excellent communicator with the ability to influence horizontally and vertically across a large, complex, and matrixed organization.
• Proven ability to manage priorities and identify outcomes with the greatest business value.
• Strong technical leadership capabilities including the ability to coach, mentor, and develop other engineers.
• Customer-centric mentality with a bias towards delivering value at the speed demanded by the business.
• Experience integrating application hosting needs with GCP infrastructure capabilities to build secure and well-architected solutions.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Expert-level knowledge in building, maintaining, and deploying infrastructure as code solutions in a DevOps environment.
• Experience with Spacelift or similar IaC automation platforms.
• Advanced GCP expertise including networking (VPC, Shared VPC, Cloud Interconnect), security (IAM, Organization Policies, Security Command Center), and compute/data services (GKE, Cloud Run, BigQuery, Cloud Storage).
• Configuration management experience using Ansible or similar tools.

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