Lead Kubernetes Platform Engineer (Cloud Engineering)

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Join a leading financial market infrastructure organization to own, automate, and scale a mission-critical Kubernetes platform powering 24/7 trading systems. This is a senior individual contributor role (no direct reports) focused on technical leadership, platform reliability, and cloud-native innovation in a regulated environment.

What You'll Do

• Design, deploy, and manage highly available Kubernetes clusters on AWS (EKS/self-managed) using Terraform and GitOps • Develop Kubernetes operators/controllers in Go (or Python) to automate application lifecycle and extend cluster functionality • Implement secure, compliant infrastructure: RBAC, Pod Security Standards, OPA/Gatekeeper, network policies, CIS/NIST alignment • Lead cluster upgrades, patching, disaster recovery, and capacity planning for production workloads • Drive CI/CD excellence with Jenkins, GitLab CI, or GitHub Actions + ArgoCD/Flux for continuous deployment • Serve as technical liaison across engineering, security, and compliance teams; mentor peers on cloud-native best practices • Document architectures, runbooks, and roadmaps; participate in on-call rotation and change control processes

Must-Have Qualifications

• 7+ years in cloud/DevOps/platform engineering with 5+ years hands-on Kubernetes in production • Deep experience with AWS + Kubernetes (EKS or self-managed): networking (CNI, ingress), storage, runtime, HA architecture • Expertise in Infrastructure as Code: Terraform (cloud + K8s resources) • Strong coding skills in Go (strongly preferred) or Python able to share production examples • Proficiency with Kubernetes ecosystem tools: Helm, kubectl, containerd/CRI-O, monitoring (PrometheGrafana) • Experience with CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins/GitLab CI/GitHub Actions) and Git workflows • Familiarity with configuration management (Ansible/Puppet/Chef) and change control in regulated environments • Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering or equivalent experience

Nice-to-Have

• CKA and/or CKS certification; AWS Solutions Architect Associate+ • Kubernetes operator development (Kubebuilder, Operator SDK) or CNCF open-source contributions • Experience with Rancher/RKE2, service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), or GitOps (ArgoCD/Flux) • Background in financial services, fintech, or other highly regulated industries • Kafka/event-driven architecture experience