Role Overview
You will own the application infrastructure layer of the platform: Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines, GitOps workflows, platform services, observability, and the runtime environment for every service. You receive provisioned and hardened servers from the IT Infrastructure engineer, and you take it from there. Everything from RKE2 cluster bootstrapping to production deployment automation to alerting is your responsibility. This is a self-hosted Kubernetes environment on bare metal, not managed cloud Kubernetes. You are responsible for the control plane, etcd, node lifecycle, and everything that runs on the cluster.
Job Description
- Manage RKE2 Kubernetes clusters across multiple node roles (control plane, compute workers, GPU workers, storage nodes), including cluster bootstrapping, upgrades, etcd backup and restore, and node lifecycle management
- Build and maintain GitOps pipelines using ArgoCD and GitLab CI/CD: Helm chart packaging, image promotion workflows (dev to staging to production), and environment-specific configuration management
- Operate and configure platform services: Kong (API gateway), Keycloak (identity), Vault (secrets), and GitLab (CI/CD and container registry)
- Implement observability: Prometheus for metrics, Grafana for dashboards, centralized logging (Loki or Elasticsearch), and alerting with on-call routing
- Manage Ceph integration at the Kubernetes level: CSI driver, StorageClass definitions, and PVC troubleshooting
- Manage GPU workload scheduling: NVIDIA device plugin, resource quotas for GPU pods, and utilization monitoring
- Automate operational tasks: certificate rotation, secret rotation, backup verification, and capacity planning
- Collaborate closely with backend engineering teams to design, deploy, troubleshoot, and optimize applications running on Kubernetes and the supporting infrastructure stack.
Requirements
- 5+ years in DevOps, SRE, or Platform engineering, with at least 2 years managing self-hosted production Kubernetes clusters (not managed K8s).
- Strong software engineering background, preferably in backend development, with a solid understanding of application architecture and software development lifecycle (SDLC).
- At least 2–3 years of hands-on experience operating self-managed Kubernetes clusters in production (RKE2, kubeadm, or equivalent), not limited to managed Kubernetes services such as EKS, GKE, or AKS.
- Strong understanding of core infrastructure components, including databases, message brokers, container registries, storage systems, and deployment automation.
- Able to troubleshoot application and infrastructure issues across the full platform stack.
- Has operated stateful workloads on Kubernetes in production (databases, Kafka, Ceph, or equivalent).
- Production experience operating at least one of: Kong, Keycloak, Vault, or equivalent service in each category (API gateway, identity provider, secret manager).
- Has built CI/CD pipelines from scratch for a team of 5+ engineers using GitLab CI or equivalent
- Has authored Helm charts and deployed applications through ArgoCD or equivalent GitOps tooling.
Preferred:
- Experience with Thanos or Cortex for long-term Prometheus metric storage
- Direct experience with Ceph CSI or Rook-Ceph on Kubernetes
- Has managed GPU workloads on Kubernetes (NVIDIA device plugin)
- NetworkPolicy design experience with Calico or Cilium
- Terraform experience for infrastructure-as-code
- Experience working closely with backend engineering teams and supporting production application deployments.
- Experience administering self-hosted Kubernetes environments rather than primarily managed cloud Kubernetes services.