Platform Engineer

This is a Contract to Hire position based out of Lincolnshire, IL.

About the role

We are looking for a skilled Kubernetes Platform Engineer to help us stabilize, scale, and evolve our Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) environment. This role works closely with application, infrastructure, and services teams to deliver, support, and maintain our Kubernetes fleet. Responsibilities span Developer Experience (DevEx), CI/CD tooling — including GitHub Actions, Harness, and Flux CD — as well as observability platforms (primarily Dynatrace) that underpin our application estate. This position is expected to be a thought leader in the Kubernetes and DevOps space, championing the elimination of technical debt, improving self-service developer tooling, and driving consistent, repeatable delivery practices across engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Kubernetes And Cloud Infrastructure
  • Manage, operate, and continuously improve Kubernetes clusters on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) across dev, staging, and production environments.
  • Design and manage IaC (Terraform / Bicep) components to provision primary and supporting infrastructure in a repeatable, auditable manner.
  • Optimize cluster performance, scalability, cost, and security posture; implement resource quotas, autoscaling (HPA/VPA/KEDA), and node pool strategies.
  • Troubleshoot and resolve issues related to AKS, container orchestration, networking (CNI, Kong Ingress Controller, Kong Mesh), and storage.
  • Maintain and enforce Kubernetes RBAC, Pod Security Standards, and network policies in alignment with security baselines.
• CI/CD And Delivery Platforms
  • Implement, maintain, and improve CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions as the primary pipeline platform — including reusable workflows, composite actions, and environment-based deployment gates.
  • Administer and extend Harness for continuous delivery orchestration, including pipeline templates, approval workflows, canary/blue-green deployment strategies, and feature flags.
  • Manage GitOps-based deployments with Flux CD; maintain Helm releases, Kustomizations, and image update automation.
  • Define and enforce branching strategies, release management processes, and promotion gates across environments.
  • Integrate security scanning (container image scanning, SAST, secret detection) into CI pipelines to shift-left on vulnerabilities.
  • Maintain artifact management practices using GitHub Packages or Azure Container Registry (ACR).
• Developer Experience And Support
  • Act as the primary platform engineering point of contact for application development teams, enabling self-service onboarding to AKS and CI/CD tooling.
  • Build and maintain internal developer tooling, golden-path templates, and paved-road patterns, including:
    • Helm chart libraries
    • GitHub Actions workflow templates
    • Harness pipeline templates
  • Provide hands-on technical support and guidance to developers troubleshooting:
    • Deployment failures
    • Container issues
    • Resource constraints
    • Pipeline errors
  • Run enablement sessions, write runbooks, and maintain internal documentation to reduce friction and support engineering velocity.
  • Partner with application teams during architecture design and pre-production readiness reviews to ensure workloads are Kubernetes-native and production-ready.
  • Champion developer feedback loops by collecting pain points and translating them into platform improvements.
• Observability And Reliability
  • Monitor and manage Kubernetes resources and infrastructure using Dynatrace as the primary observability platform; build and maintain dashboards for cluster health, workload SLIs, and pipeline performance.
  • Define and track SLOs/SLAs for platform components; lead incident response and post-mortem processes for platform-level outages.
  • Leverage Dynatrace for:
    • Full-stack APM
    • Distributed tracing
    • AI-assisted anomaly detection (Davis)
  • Integrate OpenTelemetry instrumentation for application-level observability.
  • Maintain log ingestion and analysis pipelines within:
    • Dynatrace (Log Monitoring v2)
    • Azure Monitor Logs for centralized developer and operations visibility
• Platform Strategy And Governance
  • Identify and address technical debt across the Kubernetes and DevOps toolchain; drive proactive remediation before it impacts reliability.
  • Evaluate, recommend new tooling, and platform capabilities; produce lightweight RFCs or design documents for significant changes.
  • Collaborate with Security and Compliance teams on:
    • Audit requirements
    • Vulnerability management
    • Policy-as-Code using OPA and Kyverno
  • Contribute to on-call rotation for platform-level incidents.

Skills

• Top Skills: Kubernetes, AKS, Microsoft, CI/CD, GitHub, Harness, Dynatrace, Datadog, Terraform, Bicep
• Additional Skills: New Relic, Big Panda

Pay

The pay range for this position is $75.00 - $90.00/hr.

Benefits

Eligibility requirements apply to some benefits and may depend on your job classification and length of employment. Benefits are subject to change and may be subject to specific elections, plan, or program terms. If eligible, the benefits available for this temporary role may include the following:

• Medical, dental & vision
• Critical Illness, Accident, and Hospital
• 401(k) Retirement Plan – Pre-tax and Roth post-tax contributions available
• Life Insurance (Voluntary Life & AD&D for the employee and dependents)
• Short and long-term disability
• Health Spending Account (HSA)
• Transportation benefits
• Employee Assistance Program
• Time Off/Leave (PTO, Vacation or Sick Leave)

Schedule

This is a fully onsite position in Lincolnshire, IL.