Principal Cloud Kubernetes Engineer
$140,000–$206,000 year
On-siteBoston, Massachusetts, United States
Job Summary
Define and maintain the Kubernetes platform roadmap and cloud-native strategy for multi-cluster, multi-region, and multi-cloud environments. Architect enterprise-scale platforms using EKS, AKS, GKE, Rancher, or Spectro Cloud Palette, establishing standards for cluster lifecycle, networking, and security baselines. Lead adoption of Infrastructure as Code and GitOps methodologies to deliver self-service provisioning for mission-critical workloads. Serve as the technical authority for platform engineering, automation, and cloud infrastructure, guiding architecture decisions across engineering, security, and operations teams. Establish observability standards, SLIs, and SLOs while driving root cause analysis and resiliency testing. Mentor senior engineers and influence engineering excellence to support the organization's global infrastructure goals.
Required Qualifications
- 12+ years of infrastructure, cloud engineering, DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering experience
- 7+ years of hands-on Kubernetes experience in production environments
- Deep expertise designing and operating Kubernetes platforms at enterprise scale
- Strong experience with cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, and/or GCP
- Advanced experience with GitOps methodologies and tools such as Argo CD, Flux, and Fleet
- Expert-level Terraform experience and Infrastructure as Code practices
- Strong understanding of Kubernetes internals including: Control plane architecture, Scheduling, Networking, Service discovery, Storage, Security
- Experience with service mesh technologies including Istio, Linkerd, or Consul
- Expertise in Kubernetes networking, CNI implementations, and eBPF technologies such as Cilium
- Strong programming experience with Go, Python, or similar languages
- Experience building platform automation, operators, controllers, or Kubernetes extensions
- Experience with enterprise identity integration using OIDC, SAML, LDAP, and cloud-native identity services
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with Rancher, Spectro Cloud Palette, Crossplane, Backstage, or other platform engineering solutions
- Experience designing Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)
- Experience with OpenTelemetry and distributed tracing architectures
- Experience implementing software supply chain security controls
- Experience managing regulated or highly compliant environments
- Active participation in Kubernetes or CNCF open-source communities
- Experience presenting architecture guidance to executive leadership and technical stakeholders
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
- Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)
- Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
- AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
- Google Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer
- Azure DevOps Engineer Expert
- HashiCorp Terraform Associate
- Linux Foundation Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist
- CNCF Kubestronaut Program Certifications
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