Senior Platform Engineer – Kubernetes & Middleware Platforms

The Role

We’re 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 high‑availability Kubernetes infrastructure (EKS and OpenShift), ensuring seamless middleware operations (Kafka, Redis Enterprise Cluster, 3Scale API Gateway). 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.

We’ll trust you to:

• 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 Red‑Hat 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, high‑availability, 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 micro‑segmentation.
• Configure and manage service mesh (e.g. Istio, Linkerd) for observability, traffic controls, and secure service‑to‑service 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.

You'll need to have:

• 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; hands‑on experience developing automation tooling, custom Kubernetes operators/controllers, or other platform‑level 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.

Why Lord Abbett?

Lord Abbett is a leading global independent, privately held investment management company. We are active managers and invest where we believe we have a repeatable edge and can deliver alpha for our clients. Our vision is to be the most respected asset manager in the world, admired for our people, our performance, our relationships, and our organizational agility. This inspires the three pillars of our culture.

• Principles-Based - We empower our leaders to create an environment of trust.
• Performance-Oriented - We inspire our people to embody our values, excellence, responsibility, transparency & collaboration.
• Purpose-Driven - We instill a passion for always putting our clients' interests first. 

We have been ranked #1 in Barron’s Best Fund Families for 2024 and have earned recognition as one of the Best Places to Work in Money Management by Pensions & Investments for five consecutive years.

Compensation Information: Annual base salary for this role is $140,000 - $160,000. Salary is estimated for this role. Actual pay may be different.

Discretionary Bonus: Role may be eligible to receive an annual discretionary bonus. Discretionary bonuses are determined by several factors including, but not limited to, firm, team, and individual performance. 

Benefits: Lord Abbett is committed to offering a competitive total rewards package to all eligible employees. Offerings include competitive total compensation, retirement plans, competitive health and well-being plans. To learn more about what we offer, please visit Careers | Lord Abbett

Lord Abbett is an equal employment opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all qualified individuals without regard to the following legally protected characteristics: race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, sexual identity, caregiver status, military/veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by local, state or federal law. All employment decisions at Lord Abbett are based solely on the applicant’s relevant experience, skills and qualifications.

Important notice to Search Firms - Please Read Carefully

Without prior written agreement, Lord Abbett does not accept unsolicited submissions from employment agencies, search firms, placement services, or any similar provider (“Search Firms”) for employment opportunities. All candidates submitted by Search Firms to any employee or partner at our company without a written Search Firm agreement in place will be deemed the sole property of our company. In such circumstances, no fee, commission, or other compensation will be paid to such Search Firm in the event a candidate is hired by our company. To the extent a Search Firm has a written agreement in place, all introductions are position specific and should be directed to HR or the hiring manager, so we kindly request no unsolicited phone calls or emails.

Salary : $140,000 - $160,000