Sr. K8s/Platform Engineer

• You will collect and analyze requirements from developer, data management and system reliability teams to enhance our kubernetes-based platform to meet the needs of the company.
• You will implement functionality missing in open source tools we use as k8s platform components and set up CICD pipelines to run regression and release new versions of the images.
• You will work with upstream project maintainers to integrate our customizations upstream if there is community interest.
• You will integrate bug fixes from upstream into our forked projects for customizations we are unable to integrate into upstream projects.
• You will test new versions of the platform components and prepare zero downtime upgrades for production clusters.
• You will identify areas needing improvement, look for potential replacements for current platform components and stage them to confirm we will benefit from migration to the new component.
• You will help the SRE team with automating cluster diagnostic and issue recovery as needed.
• You will help development teams with setting up their CICD pipelines and implementing gitops for their workloads.

• You can work remotely, hours can be flexible as long as you can overlap until 1 or 2pm EST

• 5+ years of running Kubernetes in production.
• 2+ years of Golang development.
• Good understanding of Kubernetes APIs and concepts is needed.
• Good understanding of inner workings of Kubernetes, both on the control plane and kubelet side is needed.
• Good understanding of gitops principles and familiarity with tools like argo cd or flux is needed.
• Familiarity with Golang's Kubernetes client library, async programming and test driven Golang development is needed.
• Contributions to open source projects related to Kubernetes in Golang are welcome.
• Ability to customize open source tools written in Golang is needed.
• Familiarity with kube-router is welcome but not required as long as you are familiar with LVS, BGP protocol and Linux firewall.
• Familiarity with project contour and/or running envoy, haproxy or nginx reverse proxies to implement external ingress into Kubernetes cluster is required.
• Ability to port legacy applications to run inside of the Kubernetes cluster required, ability to package the apps as helm charts is welcome.
• Ability to automate infrastructure tasks, create CICD pipelines and issue detection and recovery using Kubernetes is needed.
• Ability to configure and provision monitoring and alerting using Prometheus and ability to create own metric exporters for legacy apps is needed.
• Ability to configure and run centralized log aggregation using elastic search stacks is preferred but loki is also acceptable.
• Ability to collect requirements and implement solutions for SRE, network engineering and app development teams is needed.

• Ability to troubleshoot and resolve production issues under pressure is needed, ability to detect and/or automatically resolve production issues before they happen or have revenue impact is preferred.
• Knowledge of kubeadm and Puppet is welcome but not required as long as you know how to bootstrap and run a highly available kubernetes cluster in a secure and automated fashion.
• Knowledge of rook and ceph is welcome but not required as long as you have experience in persisting state in a cluster using other storage tools.
• Familiarity with Java and Kubernetes-native Java frameworks like Quarkus is welcome but not required.
• Familiarity with running workloads in GCP or AWS is welcome, but bare metal on-prem experience is preferred.

Note that this is a long-term contractor role.