Sr Platform Engineer - Kubernetes & Middleware Platforms

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Senior Platform Engineer Kubernetes & Middleware Platforms

Location: Jersey City, NJ (4 days onsite)

Full Time

The Role

My direct client is seeking a strategic technologist and Kubernetes/Container platform engineer with overall 15 years experience to lead and scale our Kubernetes container platform and middleware stack. You will architect, deploy, operate, and evolve highavailability Kubernetes infrastructure (EKS and OpenShift), ensuring seamless middleware operations (Kafka, Redis Enterprise Cluster, 3Scale APIGateway). You will automate container deployment (ArgoCD), enforce container security and network policies, oversee capacity planning, helm chart development, and define policies-as-code governance across the environment.

Your mission is to deliver a hardened, future-ready platform that enables multiple engineering teams to develop, deploy, and scale cloud-native applications reliably and securely.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement infrastructure abstractions and APIs that simplify deploying AI workloads using Kubernetes-native operations and GitOps patterns.
• Architect, deploy, and manage Kubernetes platforms (AWS EKS and RedHat OpenShift) across different environments.
• Implement GitOps workflows with ArgoCD to manage declarative app deployments.
• Design and operate middleware infrastructure:
• Highly available Kafka clusters (mirroring, partitioning, tooling)
• Managed Redis Enterprise clusters (sharding, highavailability, replication)
• 3Scale API Gateway development and administration
• Build and manage helm charts, templating, parameterization, and versioning for both platform and middleware stacks.
• Enforce container security and policy governance using policies-as-code tools (e.g. OPA, Kyverno), scanning (e.g. Clair, Snyk), and automated admission controls.
• Implement network policies (Kubernetes NetworkPolicy / Calico) to enforce segmentation and microsegmentation.
• Configure and manage service mesh (e.g. Istio, Linkerd) for observability, traffic controls, and secure servicetoservice communication.
• Conduct capacity planning, cluster sizing, resource tuning, and autoscaling strategies.
• Conduct architecture reviews, train engineers, and drive platform best practices across teams.
• Partner with SREs to define platform SLAs, uptime targets, resilience benchmarks, and alerting/monitoring.
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis, automating recovery workflows and improving platform resiliency.
  
  

Requirement:

• 15 years of overall engineering experience, including:
• At least 8 years with Kubernetes platforms (EKS, OpenShift) in production.
• Experienced in managing streaming and caching infrastructure at scale (Kafka, Redis Enterprise Clusters).
• Prior hands-on administration or development of API Management / Gateway platforms - preferably Red Hat 3Scale
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams to deploy AI workloads on Kubernetes or cloud-native platforms.
• Deep knowledge of DevSecOps principles, container security, governance, and compliance in enterprise environments.
• Strong automation experience: Helm, GitOps, ArgoCD, IaC (Terraform/AWS-CloudFormation/Ansible).
• Experience configuring service mesh, network policy controls, and multi-tenancy in Kubernetes.
• Demonstrated expertise in scripting languages such as Python, Bash, Groovy, or equivalent; handson experience developing automation tooling, custom Kubernetes operators/controllers, or other platformlevel integrations. A candidate with a software development background or experience building production-grade automation frameworks is strongly preferred.
• Thorough understanding of core Kubernetes concepts, and observability tooling.
• Demonstrated experience in capacity planning, cluster sizing, and performance tuning for critical infrastructure.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across Kubernetes, middleware, and distributed systems; experienced in leading incident response and root cause analysis.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• EKS and/or OpenShift administration certification (CKA, AWS Certified Kubernetes Administrator, Red Hat Certified OpenShift Administrator, or equivalent).
• Knowledge of middleware architecture for high-throughput, low-latency messaging systems.
• Experience with cloud cost optimization, chargeback models.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions), alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Splunk or similar tools/platforms).
• Familiarity with CNCF ecosystem tools and emerging trends in platform engineering and cloud-native environment.