Fractional Cloud Engineering for Startups
Senior GCP, GKE & DevSecOps expertise — without the full-time hire.
Your junior team is stuck. Deployments are failing in production. The CI/CD pipeline broke again at 11pm. Security gaps are piling up. And your next round of funding depends on building a platform that actually scales.
You need a senior cloud engineer. You just don’t need one full-time.
That’s exactly what this is. I’m Amit Malhotra — a Principal GCP Architect with 20+ years of engineering experience, including hands-on app development, GKE platform design, DevSecOps, and GCP infrastructure. I work with early to growth-stage startups as an embedded technical lead — unblocking your team, fixing what’s broken, and building the cloud foundations your product needs to grow.
If Any of These Sound Familiar, You're in the Right Place
GKE Deployment Failures in Production
Your Kubernetes workloads are crashing, rollbacks are taking down live traffic, and nobody on your team has seen this failure mode before. Pod scheduling issues, misconfigured resource limits, broken liveness probes, broken ingress configs — GKE in production is unforgiving, and junior engineers learn that the hard way.
CI/CD Pipelines That Break at the Worst Time
Pipelines that worked fine in staging are failing in production. Secrets aren’t being injected correctly. Container images aren’t versioned properly. Merge-to-deploy triggers are firing when they shouldn’t. Every pipeline failure is a delayed release and a frustrated team. When your deployment process is unpredictable, everything else slows down.
Security Gaps You Know Exist but Haven’t Fixed
Overprivileged service accounts. Workloads running as root. No network policies between namespaces. Secrets hardcoded in environment variables. If an auditor or a prospective enterprise customer looked at your GCP environment today, what would they find? For startups heading toward SOC 2 or enterprise sales, unaddressed security debt kills deals.
GCP Costs That Don’t Make Sense
Your cloud bill is growing faster than your user base. Clusters are overprovisioned. Idle resources are running around the clock. Nobody has set up committed use discounts or right-sized workloads. Cost inefficiency at the startup stage compounds fast — and it’s almost always fixable with the right architectural decisions.
A Junior Team Hitting a Technical Ceiling
Your engineers are smart and motivated. But they don’t have the production scars that come from years of running Kubernetes clusters at scale, implementing Zero Trust security models, or designing CI/CD pipelines that hold up under real load. When they hit complex problems, they spin. The answers exist — they just need someone who’s been there.
What I Do — and How It Works
I work with your team directly, on a monthly retainer starting at 10 hours per month. No long contracts, no discovery-only engagements. You get senior-level cloud engineering capacity on a flexible, predictable model that fits a startup budget.
GKE Platform Engineering & Deployment Architecture
Cluster design, namespace strategy, workload identity, resource quotas, HPA configuration, rolling deployments, and blue/green or canary release patterns. I help you build a GKE platform your team can actually operate — not just one that passes a demo.
DevSecOps — Pipelines That Ship Safely
Cloud Build, GitHub Actions, or your existing CI/CD tooling — I design and fix pipelines that are fast, reproducible, and secure. This includes secrets management via Secret Manager, artifact versioning in Artifact Registry, environment promotion gates, and pre-deployment policy checks. Security is built in, not bolted on.
Cloud Security & GCP Hardening
Zero Trust network architecture, least-privilege IAM, Workload Identity Federation, VPC Service Controls, binary authorization, and GKE security posture hardening. If you’re heading toward SOC 2 compliance or enterprise customer requirements, I help you build the right security foundations from the start instead of retrofitting them later.
→ Learn more about my approach to DevSecOps & Cloud Security
Infrastructure as Code — Terraform Done Right
If your infrastructure isn’t reproducible, it’s a liability. I design modular Terraform architectures that support multi-environment deployments, state management best practices, and team-based workflows. No more snowflake environments that only one person understands.
GCP Architecture Review & Cost Optimization
An objective review of your current GCP environment — architecture decisions, security posture, cost drivers, and reliability risks. I give you a clear picture of where you stand and a prioritized list of what to fix, in the order that matters.
→ See my full approach to Google Cloud Architecture & Modernization
Team Enablement & Technical Mentorship
Fixing problems matters. Building a team that doesn’t repeat them matters more. Part of how I work is making sure your junior engineers understand why decisions were made — through code reviews, architecture walkthroughs, and async Loom or Slack explanations. Over time, your team gets better. That’s the goal.
How the Engagement Works
Phase | What Happens |
Week 1 — Discovery Call & Assessment | 30-minute call to understand your current environment, the problems you’re hitting, and what your team looks like. I’ll ask direct questions and give you direct answers. |
Week 1–2 — Environment Review | I review your GCP environment, GKE setup, CI/CD pipelines, IAM configuration, and cost structure. You get a clear picture of where the risk and the waste are. |
Month 1+ — Retainer Begins | We agree on a monthly retainer starting at 10 hours/month. Hours are used for hands-on work, async reviews, architectural guidance, or team support — based on your priorities. |
Ongoing — Flexible Scaling | As your needs evolve, we adjust. Some months are heavier on hands-on work. Others are mostly advisory. You’re never locked into a scope that doesn’t fit. |
✓ Starts at 10 hours/month — fits a startup budget
✓ No long-term contracts required
✓ Hands-on engineering, not just recommendations
✓ Async-first — works with distributed teams across Canada & USA
✓ You work directly with me, not a junior subcontractor
Who This Is For
This engagement is designed for:
- Early to growth-stage B2B SaaS startups running on Google Cloud Platform
- Teams with solid junior engineers who are hitting complex cloud problems they haven’t seen before
- Founders or CTOs who know they need senior cloud expertise but aren’t ready to justify a full-time $180K+ hire
- Startups approaching SOC 2 compliance, enterprise customer requirements, or their first Series A technical diligence
- Teams that deployed quickly and are now dealing with the accumulated cost of those early decisions
→ See my industry page for Digital Products & High-Growth Startups
Why Work With Me
Most cloud consultants come from either the infrastructure side or the application development side. I come from both. That matters more than it sounds.
When a GKE deployment fails in production, the root cause is often not in the Kubernetes config — it’s in how the application handles startup probes, how secrets are loaded at runtime, or how the build process packages the container. If you’ve only ever worked on infra, you miss that. I don’t.
I’ve spent over 20 years working across application development, cloud infrastructure, and DevSecOps — and the last 6 years focused specifically on Google Cloud Platform. I’ve designed GKE platforms for banks, health-tech companies, and SaaS startups. I’ve implemented SOC 2-compliant DevSecOps pipelines under real audit pressure. I’ve rebuilt CI/CD pipelines that were shipping broken code to production and turned them into reliable, secure delivery systems.
I work directly with your team. There’s no account manager between us, no junior consultant doing the work while I handle the sales call. When you book time with me, you get me.
→ Read more about my background — About Amit Malhotra
Common Questions
How is this different from hiring a freelance contractor?
A contractor fills a seat. This is more like having a senior technical advisor and hands-on engineer in one. I’m not just executing tickets — I’m helping you make better architectural decisions, unblocking your team when they’re stuck, and building your team’s capabilities over time. The retainer model also means you have consistent access, not a scramble every time something breaks.
We’re on AWS/Azure — can you still help?
My deep expertise is Google Cloud Platform. If your stack is primarily GCP, this engagement is designed for you. If you’re multi-cloud with a GCP component, reach out and let’s discuss.
What if we need more than 10 hours in a given month?
Not a problem. We can adjust hours up or down based on what’s happening in your environment. Some months are heavier than others — we’ll handle that as it comes.
We’re early-stage and not sure we’re ready. Should we still reach out?
Yes. The earlier you get the architecture right, the less you pay to fix it later. If you’re not sure whether you need this, a 30-minute conversation will tell us both.
Do you work with teams that have no cloud engineer at all?
Yes. Some of the startups I work with have developers who understand their application deeply but have never run production infrastructure before. I can serve as your de facto cloud engineering lead while your team is building that muscle internally.
Ready to Stop Firefighting?
Let’s spend 30 minutes on your specific situation — your environment, your team, your blockers. No proposal upfront. Just a direct technical conversation.
→ Book a Free 30-Minute Discovery Call
Or email directly: amit@buoyantcloudtech.com
Based in Toronto (EST) — working with engineering teams across Canada & USA.
Ready to Build a Platform That Scales Without the Tech Debt?
