Tech Lead/Manager, K8s @ PulsePoint

About PulsePoint:

PulsePoint is a fast-growing healthcare technology company (with adtech roots) using real-time data to transform healthcare. We help brands and agencies interpret the hard-to-read signals across the health journey and unify these digital determinants of health with real-world data to produce the most dimensional view of the customer. Our award-winning advertising platforms use machine learning and programmatic automation to seamlessly activate this data, making marketing, predictive analytics, and decision support easy and instantaneous.

Tech Lead/Manager, K8s:

As a Tech Lead of the SRE team overseeing Kubernetes, you will be challenged, expected to grow your technical knowledge, challenge your fellow team members, and they will challenge you back. Our team is not competitive, but we are goal-oriented and driven to succeed.

What you'll be doing:

• Lead a team of SREs responsible for Kubernetes infrastructure to achieve their personal and shared goals, thrive in their roles, as well as spearheading the engineering efforts by your own example.

• Ensure maximum availability, reliability, and scalability of our multi-datacenter hybrid Linux environments (10 clusters, 1000 nodes, 20k pods, 1mil qps).
• Performance and resilience testing. This may include reviewing configuration, software choices/versions, hardware specs, etc.
• Advance our technology stack with innovative ideas and new creative solutions.
• Participate in capacity management of core systems and services, application analysis, performance, and security tuning.
• Create strategies for long-term permanent fixes to critical production incidents.
• Maintain documentation, build tooling, and create alerts to both identify and address infrastructure reliability.
• Proactively identify system anomalies.

• Conducting post-mortems and communicating impact and remediation strategies with service owners and C-level staff.

What you’ll need:

• You will be required to work East Coast U.S. hours 9am-6pm EST, same as the rest of the K8s team

• Location: Remote in U.S. (preferred) or anywhere in the world, as long as you can work East Coast U.S. hours
• Minimum 10 years of relevant experience
• Minimum 3 years of management experience

• Thorough understanding of Linux (we use CentOS/Rocky).
• Advanced knowledge of K8s and its ecosystem:
• Extensive hands-on experience deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters on bare metal servers in production environments.
• Immaculate knowledge of best practices for architecting cross-datacenter Kubernetes clusters running on-premise with automated management using kubeadm.
• Bare metal server configuration optimization know-how for Kubernetes workloads, including networking, storage and security considerations.
• Kubelet and CRI tuning in accordance with best practices, including but not limited to NUMA and GPU optimization.
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes internals, including etcd, container network interfaces and container runtimes.
• Thorough understanding of PKI certificates for all components (ability to manually troubleshoot and solve client, server, and control-plane certificate issues within Kubernetes with zero downtime).
• Vast experience in the development of custom Kubernetes operators and autoscalers, as well as tailored ingress/egress controllers, custom resource definitions.
• Fluency in GitOps automation tools (Flux v1/v2), comprehensive knowledge of Helm and Kustomize controllers.
• Ability to manage BGP configuration, mastery in kube-router and GoBGP, as well as MetalLB.
• Understanding of the most intricate details in rook/ceph implementation for Kubernetes.
• Profound knowledge of docker (docker-shim), containerd and runc internals at the kernel level.
• Deep understanding of Puppet configuration management toolset (experience with Chef, CFEngine or Salt also works).
• Experience administering NoSQL databases (Redis, ES).
• Experience with scalable infrastructure monitoring solutions such as Icinga, Prometheus, ELK.
• Strong scripting and automation skills using languages like Python, Ruby, Java, or Go.

• Advanced understanding of networking concepts (TCP/IP stack, BGP, DNS, CDN, load balancing).

Bonus, but not required:

• Close familiarity with Cassandra at scale.

• Understanding of Kafka architecture.
• Experience in AdTech or High-Frequency Trading is a plus.

• Experience with Security-related best practices is a plus.