We are seeking a seasoned Senior Platform Engineer with production-level cloud-native experience who has fully owned major platform migrations at scale. This role requires deep, hands-on mastery of Kubernetes operations, GitOps delivery, service mesh architecture, platform security, and full-stack observability, along with a proven ability to define paths forward, validate them with stakeholders, and drive them to completion without relying on step-by-step instructions. Responsibilities Collaborate with the Lead Platform Architect to shape and execute core platform workstreams, including GitOps delivery, observability, security postures, data operators, and the Istio mesh rollout Design and implement GitOps pipelines via ArgoCD, establishing promotion paths, drift detection, self-healing mechanisms, and secure secrets management Configure and optimize the observability stack while actively defining SLOs, SLIs, and actionable alerts Drive the Istio service mesh rollout, implement phased adoption, secure mTLS policies, advanced traffic management, and proactive troubleshooting Harden platform security layers, ensure robust implementation of Coraza WAF at the ingress, HashiCorp Vault for secrets/PKI, and baseline Kubernetes security policies Manage stateful workload migrations, plan and execute cutovers for PostgreSQL and Kafka with precise validation routines and bulletproof rollback strategies Author operational documentation and runbooks, establish gold standards for Day-2 operations, incident response playbooks, and customer handovers Mentor the engineering team, share specialized knowledge in Kubernetes, GitOps, observability, and platform security to elevate overall team capabilities Maintain a continuous feedback loop with the Lead Platform Architect to surface risks, propose pragmatic solutions, and refine migration strategies dynamically Requirements 5+ years of production-level cloud-native experience with full ownership of major platform migrations at scale Expertise in Kubernetes multi-environment cluster design, advanced scheduling, CNI/NetworkPolicies/DNS networking, RBAC/Pod Security Standards, and complex troubleshooting Proficiency in Helm chart authoring, release lifecycle governance, chart testing, and establishing organization-wide Helm standards Skills in the Kubernetes Operator pattern, with hands-on experience in PostgreSQL Operator (HA, failover, backup/PITR, PgBouncer) and Strimzi (broker configurations, topic/user operators, rolling updates, cruise control) Background in production-scale ArgoCD ownership, including ApplicationSets, sync waves/windows, environment promotion, and CI/CD-to-GitOps migrations Deep experience in Istio service mesh migrations, covering traffic management, mTLS enforcement, AuthorizationPolicies, ingress/egress gateway setups, and mesh-level observability Knowledge of Coraza WAF, including rule/policy authoring using OWASP CRS, integration at the Istio ingress/gateway layer, and false-positive tuning for production environments Competency in HashiCorp Vault operations, Kubernetes auth method integrations, secret engines, and rotation/lease management Familiarity with Prometheus architecture, Grafana dashboards, OpenTelemetry tracing, log aggregation, and SRE fundamentals including SLO/SLI definition and error budgets Understanding of operator-driven PostgreSQL and Kafka migrations, including schema compatibility, consumer group offset management, MirrorMaker 2, and data validation/rollback strategies
