Service Mesh Engineer (Istio / Linkerd)

Design, deploy, and operate service mesh platforms — primarily Istio and Linkerd — across multi-cluster Kubernetes environments. Implement and operate mTLS, certificate rotation, and identity propagation across the mesh. Define traffic management policies including routing, retries, circuit breaking, and fault injection. Integrate the mesh with ingress, egress, and API gateway tiers for unified traffic management. Build observability for mesh traffic including distributed tracing, golden signals, and topology visualization. Design multi-cluster and cross-cluster mesh topologies for high availability and tenant isolation. Profile and optimize mesh performance, sidecar resource usage, and control-plane footprint, applying systematic measurement, targeted improvements, and data-driven validation to deliver quantifiable gains in throughput, latency, or resource efficiency. Develop paved-road adoption patterns and onboarding guides that make mesh adoption easy for app teams. Implement authorization policies and zero-trust patterns at the service mesh layer. Operate service mesh upgrades, control-plane lifecycle management, and configuration governance, applying disciplined release practices that keep the mesh current without disrupting workloads running on top of it. Partner with SRE, platform, and security teams on mesh policy and incident response. Troubleshoot complex networking, mTLS, and traffic issues spanning sidecar and gateway tiers. Maintain runbooks, architecture diagrams, and onboarding materials for the service mesh platform. Stay current with Istio, Linkerd, Cilium, and broader service mesh ecosystem developments.