Kubernetes Service Engineer

Kubernetes Service Engineer

Design, deploy, and operate service mesh platforms—primarily Istio and Linkerd—to enable secure, observable, reliable service-to-service communication across Kubernetes environments.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate service mesh platforms (primarily Istio and Linkerd) across multi-cluster Kubernetes
• Implement mTLS, certificate rotation, and identity propagation across the mesh
• Define traffic management policies (routing, retries, circuit breaking, fault injection)
• Integrate the mesh with ingress, egress, and API gateway layers
• Build mesh observability: distributed tracing, golden signals, and topology visualization
• Design multi-cluster/cross-cluster topologies for high availability and tenant isolation
• Profile and optimize mesh performance (sidecar resource usage, control-plane footprint) using measurement and data-driven validation
• Create paved-road adoption patterns and onboarding guides for application teams
• Implement authorization policies and zero-trust patterns at the service mesh layer
• Manage mesh upgrades, control-plane lifecycle, and configuration governance with disciplined release practices
• Partner with SRE, platform, and security teams on mesh policy and incident response
• Troubleshoot complex issues across sidecar and gateway tiers (networking, mTLS, traffic)
• Maintain runbooks, architecture diagrams, and onboarding materials

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field
• 5+ years of experience in platform engineering, SRE, or networking
• Hands-on production experience operating Istio or Linkerd
• Deep understanding of Envoy and its data plane
• Strong Kubernetes expertise (networking, CNI, ingress)
• Strong understanding of mTLS/PKI and certificate lifecycle management
• Experience with distributed tracing and observability for mesh traffic
• Proficiency in Go or Python for tooling/automation
• Strong troubleshooting skills across networking, application, and control-plane layers
• Excellent communication and collaboration

Preferred Qualifications

• Multi-cluster Istio/Linkerd deployments
• Familiarity with Cilium and eBPF networking
• Open-source contributions to service mesh projects
• Experience with SPIFFE/SPIRE workload identity
• Exposure to zero-trust networking initiatives at enterprise scale

Location / Work Mode

• 100% Remote (U.S.)

Salary / Type

• Full-time, Direct W2
• Salary range: $100,000–$150,000 annually

Sponsorship Notes

• Encourages applications from U.S. Citizens, Green Card holders, EAD holders, and H-1B transfer candidates.
• They are unable to sponsor new H-1B visa petitions for this position.