Senior Platform Engineer — Java + GCP
Join the platform team that owns the foundations the rest of engineering builds on.
Position Overview:
Anaqua is hiring a Senior Platform Engineer to join our platform team. Together with the team you will build the shared microservices and Spring Boot libraries every product team consumes, help shape company-wide standards for hosting, application security, deployment and monitoring, and contribute to the multi-region high-availability story for the new Anaqua / RightHub stack on GCP. Hands-on Java. Hands-on infra. Senior individual contributor — not a lead or manager role.
You'll love this job if you like to:
- Build shared Spring Boot services and libraries with the team — auth, async tasks, replication, observability defaults — that every product team builds on top of.
- Help shape the company-wide playbook for how services get deployed, secured, monitored and rolled back.
- Work alongside the team on multi-region GCP — GKE, global load balancing, autoscaling, zero-downtime deploys with Helm and GitLab CI.
- Contribute to edge and application security — gateway policies, API key and JWT issuance, dependency hygiene, GCP IAM least-privilege.
- Take part in architectural decisions on event sourcing, Pub/Sub topology, schema design and service boundaries — and document them so the rest of engineering can follow.
- Show up for design reviews and platform RFCs alongside the rest of the team.
What you will need to be successful
- Deep production Java with Spring Boot — comfortable with transactional boundaries, connection pools, JVM behaviour under load and how things actually break in production.
- Hands-on experience building shared platform libraries or Spring Boot starters that other teams consume — this is the headline ask.
- Strong infrastructure and DevOps chops on a major public cloud (GCP preferred) — Kubernetes in production (GKE), Helm, multi-region deploys, autoscaling, rollbacks.
- Terraform as a daily tool — modules per service, IAM, networking, Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL.
- Hosting and application security ownership — gateway and edge policies, secret management, dependency scanning, IAM hygiene.
- PostgreSQL depth — schema design, indexing, query plans, migrations under load, JSONB-heavy data modelling.
- Event sourcing and asynchronous messaging — designing aggregates and events, integrating services via GCP Pub/Sub, idempotency and ordering.
- Contract-first APIs with OpenAPI — the schema is the source of truth.
- Production observability and incident response on GCP — structured logging, alerting, debugging distributed flows.
- Strong testing discipline — unit and integration tests against real Postgres and Pub/Sub as part of normal development.
- Excellent written and spoken English.
AI-first mindset
- Treats AI tooling as a daily collaborator, not a gimmick — Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot in the dev loop.
- Designs platform contracts (OpenAPI, typed events, structured logs) so AI agents and humans can both work against them.
- Has a view on AI in the SDLC — agent-assisted code review, AI-generated runbooks, codegen scaffolding.
- Sensible about secrets, audit trails and data boundaries when AI integrations touch internal systems.
Professional skills and mindset
- End-to-end on your work — designs, ships, monitors and debugs.
- Writes — design docs, RFCs, runbooks. Decisions get documented, not just made.
- Pragmatic — ships value before perfect abstractions.
- Raises the bar with peers, not by gate-keeping; happy to share knowledge across the team.
- Comfortable making calls under ambiguity and changing them when the data says so.
- Strong customer and business empathy — connects platform work back to product impact.
- Plays well in a small senior team — opinions held lightly, decisions made together.
A plus, not required
- GCP Professional Cloud Architect (or equivalent) certification.
- gRPC, Envoy or GKE Gateway API experience.
- Experience working on an internal developer platform or “golden path” for service teams.
- React or Next.js working knowledge for occasional cross-stack work.
- Background in IP management, legal-tech or regulated B2B SaaS.
