Kubernetes Engineer

Role Overview

Kubernetes Engineer (Containers / EKS Specialist) — Remote across the USA. Own EKS platform design and implement a standardized “Golden Cluster” approach, operating within well-defined AWS service boundaries.

Responsibilities

• Assess the current EKS landscape (20+ clusters) and propose a cluster consolidation strategy
• Make and resolve architecture decisions across CNI and service mesh
• Design and implement the Golden Cluster template using Terraform
• Implement CNI, network policies, and service mesh components
• Define strategies for ingress and persistent storage
• Define pilot scope and deploy/validate pilot workloads end-to-end
• Create EKS upgrade procedures and maintain cluster lifecycle runbooks
• Deploy GitHub Actions Runner Controller on EKS (if adopted)

Required Skills

• Deep operational experience with Amazon EKS
• Kubernetes expertise including RBAC, namespaces, and Pod Security Standards
• Strong CNI experience (e.g., VPC CNI, Cilium, Calico)
• Service mesh experience (e.g., Istio with Ambient/sidecar, Cilium mesh)
• Ingress experience (e.g., ALB Ingress Controller, Nginx, Istio Gateway)
• Helm and Terraform (including EKS module development)
• Persistent storage experience: EFS CSI, EBS CSI, Velero
• Customer-facing, high-visibility communication skills

Nice to Have

• Python microservices experience (preferred)