Service Mesh Engineer

Job Summary

We are looking for a Service Mesh Engineer to design, deploy, and operate service mesh platforms — primarily Istio and Linkerd — that provide secure, observable, and reliable service-to-service communication across our Kubernetes estate. The role focuses on platform engineering, mesh adoption, mTLS, traffic policy, and helping application teams reap the benefits of a mesh without paying for unnecessary complexity.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and operate service mesh platforms — primarily Istio and Linkerd — across multi-cluster Kubernetes environments
• Implement and operate mTLS, certificate rotation, and identity propagation across the mesh
• Define traffic management policies including routing, retries, circuit breaking, and fault injection
• Integrate the mesh with ingress, egress, and API gateway tiers for unified traffic management
• Build observability for mesh traffic including distributed tracing, golden signals, and topology visualization
• Design multi-cluster and cross-cluster mesh topologies for high availability and tenant isolation
• Profile and optimize mesh performance, sidecar resource usage, and control-plane footprint, applying systematic measurement, targeted improvements, and data-driven validation to deliver quantifiable gains in throughput, latency, or resource efficiency
• Develop paved-road adoption patterns and onboarding guides that make mesh adoption easy for app teams
• Implement authorization policies and zero-trust patterns at the service mesh layer
• Operate service mesh upgrades, control-plane lifecycle management, and configuration governance, applying disciplined release practices that keep the mesh current without disrupting workloads running on top of it
• Partner with SRE, platform, and security teams on mesh policy and incident response
• Troubleshoot complex networking, mTLS, and traffic issues spanning sidecar and gateway tiers
• Maintain runbooks, architecture diagrams, and onboarding materials for the service mesh platform
• Stay current with Istio, Linkerd, Cilium, and broader service mesh ecosystem developments

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field
• Five or more years of experience in platform engineering, SRE, or networking roles
• Hands-on experience operating Istio or Linkerd in production
• Strong understanding of Envoy proxy internals and configuration
• Deep Kubernetes expertise including networking, CNI, and ingress
• Experience with distributed tracing and observability for mesh traffic
• Proficiency in Go or Python for tooling and automation
• Strong troubleshooting skills across networking, application, and control plane layers
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with multi-cluster Istio or Linkerd deployments
• Familiarity with Cilium service mesh and eBPF networking
• Open-source contributions to service mesh projects
• Exposure to zero-trust networking initiatives at enterprise scale