Principal Cloud Kubernetes Engineer

Key Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the Kubernetes platform roadmap and cloud-native strategy.
• Architect multi-cluster, multi-region, and multi-cloud Kubernetes platforms supporting enterprise-scale workloads.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and provide technical guidance on platform modernization initiatives.
• Lead technical decision-making for container orchestration, platform automation, and cloud infrastructure investments.
• Design, deploy, and operate enterprise Kubernetes platforms using EKS, AKS, GKE, Rancher, Spectro Cloud Palette, or equivalent technologies.
• Define cluster lifecycle management processes including provisioning, upgrades, patching, and decommissioning.
• Architect multi-tenant Kubernetes environments with strong isolation, governance, and compliance controls.
• Design Kubernetes networking architectures leveraging Cilium, Calico, service mesh technologies, and eBPF-based observability.
• Establish cluster security baselines and platform governance standards.
• Lead adoption of Infrastructure as Code and GitOps methodologies across engineering teams.
• Develop reusable Terraform modules, Helm charts, and platform automation frameworks.
• Design self-service provisioning capabilities for Kubernetes clusters, environments, and application onboarding.
• Implement Kubernetes Operators, controllers, and automation frameworks to eliminate operational toil.
• Define platform engineering patterns enabling rapid and consistent infrastructure delivery.
• Arcitect Kubernetes solutions spanning AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-premises environments.
• Design resilient multi-region and disaster recovery architectures.
• Lead cloud infrastructure modernization initiatives and workload migrations.
• Define backup, recovery, business continuity, and platform resiliency strategies.
• Establish storage architectures using Portworx, CSI drivers, OpenEBS, or cloud-native storage services.
• Define enterprise observability standards and platform reliability objectives.
• Establish SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for critical platform services.
• Architect monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting solutions using Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Loki, and related technologies.
• Lead root cause analysis efforts for major incidents and drive systemic improvements.
• Develop resilience strategies, chaos engineering, and disaster recovery validation programs.
• Establish Kubernetes security architecture and cloud security standards.
• Lead implementation of policy-as-code frameworks using Kyverno, OPA/Gatekeeper, and admission controllers.
• Define workload identity, secrets management, and zero-trust platform strategies.
• Partner with security teams to satisfy regulatory, audit, and compliance requirements.
• Drive secure software supply chain initiatives including image signing, SBOM validation, and runtime protection.
• Contribute to organizational technology strategy and long-term infrastructure planning.

Required Qualifications

• 12+ years of infrastructure, cloud engineering, DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering experience.
• 7+ years of hands-on Kubernetes experience in production environments.
• Advanced experience with GitOps methodologies and tools such as Argo CD, Flux, and Fleet.
• Expert-level Terraform experience and Infrastructure as Code practices.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes internals including: Control plane architecture, Scheduling, Networking, Service discovery, Storage, Security.
• Experience with service mesh technologies including Istio, Linkerd, or Consul.
• Expertise in Kubernetes networking, CNI implementations, and eBPF technologies such as Cilium.
• Strong programming experience with Go, Python, or similar languages.
• Experience building platform automation, operators, controllers, or Kubernetes extensions.
• Experience with enterprise identity integration using OIDC, SAML, LDAP, and cloud-native identity services.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Rancher, Spectro Cloud Palette, Crossplane, Backstage, or other platform engineering solutions.
• Experience designing Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs).
• Experience with OpenTelemetry and distributed tracing architectures.
• Experience implementing software supply chain security controls.
• Experience managing regulated or highly compliant environments.
• Active participation in Kubernetes or CNCF open-source communities.
• Experience presenting architecture guidance to executive leadership and technical stakeholders.