Senior Kubernetes Platform Engineer

Location: Lafayette, LA, Knoxville, TN, Columbia, SC, Birmingham, AL

Type: Direct Hire

Responsibilities: Own the full Kubernetes lifecycle — from cluster provisioning and upgrades to node management and deprecation planning — ensuring high availability and operational controls across all environments. Optimize networking, ingress, and secure traffic flows, implement workload reliability patterns such as autoscaling and resilience testing. Establish observability practices for metrics, logs, traces, and alerting to ensure platform reliability. Implement security best practices, including RBAC, policy enforcement, image controls, secrets management, and runtime hardening. Build platform automation using Infrastructure as Code and GitOps workflows. Support incident response and troubleshoot performance issues for containerized production services. Manage multiple production Amazon EKS environments at scale, including provisioning, upgrades, and retirement planning. Configure and manage AWS networking and security components such as VPC, IAM, load balancers, and storage integrations. Implement container deployment strategies and reliability engineering practices like autoscaling, resource tuning, and scheduling.

Requirements: 5+ years experience in DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering, with significant hands-on Kubernetes production experience. Solid track record managing production Kubernetes environments, especially Amazon EKS, at scale. Experience owning the full cluster lifecycle — provisioning, upgrades, node pools, and retirement planning. Strong knowledge of AWS networking and security fundamentals: VPC, IAM, load balancers, and storage integrations. Hands-on experience with container deployment strategies and reliability engineering (autoscaling, resource tuning, scheduling).Practical automation skills using Terraform or Cloud Formation. Experience setting up monitoring, logging, and alerting for containerized workloads. Familiarity with Kubernetes security practices — RBAC, policy enforcement, secrets management, image hardening.

Bonus: Exposure to GitLab CI/CD pipelines for Kubernetes deployments.

Bonus: Experience standardizing platforms or managing multiple clusters across teams. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field.