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Senior Kubernetes Architect (UK/Portugal)
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Senior Kubernetes Architect – Enterprise-Scale Kubernetes #3147
The Mission
What does Kubernetes look like when you’re operating at 200+ clusters across AWS Regions, Local Zones, and Outposts? Join a platform engineering engagement where Kubernetes architecture, automation, security, and scalability are happening at enterprise scale.
You’ll work alongside a Principal Architect and global engineering teams to review an existing Kubernetes platform, challenge architectural patterns, recommend improvements, and get hands-on when it’s time to turn those ideas into production-ready solutions. This is a role for someone who enjoys going beyond “keeping the clusters running” — and wants to shape how large-scale Kubernetes platforms are designed and operated.
The Role
- Kubernetes Architecture: Review and improve large-scale Kubernetes architectures, cluster configurations, and operational patterns across multi-region AWS environments.
- Enterprise Kubernetes: Work across ~200 clusters deployed across AWS Regions, Local Zones, and Outposts, supporting global product teams.
- Ingress & Networking: Evaluate and optimize ingress controllers and networking patterns using technologies such as NGINX, Traefik, AWS Load Balancer Controller, and service mesh.
- Platform Engineering: Collaborate with platform engineers to refine reusable Kubernetes modules, blueprints, templates, and standards.
- Infrastructure as Code: Build and manage infrastructure using Terraform, Helm, and GitOps tools such as ArgoCD or FluxCD.
- AWS & EKS: Design and optimize Kubernetes workloads running on EKS, including VPC networking, IAM, security groups, IRSA, Local Zones, and Outposts.
- Production Engineering: Troubleshoot, optimize, and support production deployments, rollouts, workloads, and platform reliability.
- Security & Compliance: Strengthen Kubernetes security through RBAC, policy frameworks, image security, and enterprise compliance practices.
- Observability: Work with monitoring and logging ecosystems such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, and OpenTelemetry.
- Architecture & Documentation: Partner with architects and stakeholders to document technical decisions, standards, operational guidelines, and best practices.
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The "Must-Haves"
- Kubernetes: 5+ years of hands-on experience designing, deploying, and managing Kubernetes environments.
- Enterprise Scale: Experience working with large-scale Kubernetes environments, ideally 100+ clusters.
- AWS / EKS: Strong experience with Amazon EKS, AWS networking, IAM, VPCs, security groups, IRSA, and cloud-native infrastructure.
- Multi-Region: Experience with multi-region, hybrid, or distributed Kubernetes deployments.
- Kubernetes Internals: Strong understanding of the Kubernetes API, controllers, operators, CRDs, and cluster lifecycle management.
- Infrastructure as Code: Strong hands-on experience with Terraform and Helm.
- GitOps: Experience with ArgoCD, FluxCD, or similar GitOps platforms.
- Ingress & Networking: Practical experience with Kubernetes ingress controllers and cloud networking.
- Production: Proven experience troubleshooting and supporting Kubernetes workloads and deployments in production environments.
- CI/CD: Experience integrating Kubernetes workflows with enterprise CI/CD pipelines such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI.
- Observability: Hands-on experience with Kubernetes monitoring, logging, and operational tooling.
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The "Bonus" Skills
- Service Mesh: Experience with Istio, Linkerd, or similar technologies.
- Multi-Tenancy: Exposure to multi-tenant Kubernetes architectures.
- Policy & Security: Experience with OPA/Gatekeeper, Kyverno, container security scanning, and compliance.
- Stateful Workloads: Strong understanding of persistent storage and data-service patterns using EBS, EFS, FSx, or similar technologies.
- AWS Certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional or similar.
- Kubernetes Certifications: CKA, CKAD, or CKS.
- Platform Engineering: Experience supporting multiple global product teams through an internal platform engineering model.
Personal Traits
- Kubernetes Architect at Heart: Enjoys thinking about architecture, patterns, scalability, and the long-term health of a platform.
- Hands-On Problem Solver: Comfortable moving from architecture diagrams into actual implementation, troubleshooting, and optimization.
- Scale-Minded: Gets excited by complex environments and understands what changes when Kubernetes grows from a handful of clusters to hundreds.
- Pragmatic Engineer: Can challenge existing approaches while balancing reliability, security, operational complexity, and business needs.
- Strong Communicator: Comfortable explaining technical decisions to architects, engineers, and non-technical stakeholders.
- Independent & Collaborative: Thrives in a distributed environment while knowing when to collaborate, challenge, or take ownership.
- Operationally Curious: Always looking for ways to make platforms more reliable, secure, observable, and easier for engineering teams to use.
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