Integration Engineer III Senior

Join a forward-thinking organization at the forefront of technological innovation, where you'll play a pivotal role in shaping the future of enterprise-grade platforms. This company is dedicated to transforming its technology landscape and driving complex cloud-native initiatives, empowering development teams to deliver cutting-edge solutions.

Aquent is seeking a highly skilled and passionate Senior Kubernetes Platform Engineer to join our client's dynamic team. In this critical role, you will serve as a technical leader, directly impacting the scalability, reliability, and efficiency of core systems. You'll be instrumental in designing, building, and operating advanced container orchestration platforms, enabling developers to deploy applications with unparalleled speed and stability. Your expertise will not only drive architectural decisions but also mentor junior engineers, fostering a culture of innovation and excellence.

**What You Will Do:**

* Design, build, and maintain scalable Kubernetes platforms that enable development teams to deploy and run containerized applications efficiently and reliably.

* Lead the architecture and implementation of cloud-native solutions using Kubernetes, cloud services, and infrastructure as code to meet business and technical requirements.

* Develop and maintain Terraform modules and configurations for provisioning and managing Kubernetes clusters, cloud infrastructure, and related platform services.

* Drive platform engineering efforts both independently and by leading other team members through complex technical challenges.

* Act as a technology advocate, independently seeking opportunities where Kubernetes, containerization, and cloud technologies can be utilized to improve platform capabilities and developer experience.

* Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior and mid-level engineers, fostering a collaborative team environment and promoting best practices in container orchestration and cloud architecture.

* Continuously expand technical knowledge in emerging Kubernetes features, cloud services, and cloud-native technologies.

* Take ownership of platform services and infrastructure at scale. Make informed decisions on evolving, modernizing, and optimizing the Kubernetes platform and cloud architecture.

* Implement and maintain monitoring, logging, and alerting solutions for containerized workloads and platform health.

* Support platform releases and critical incidents that may occur outside of business hours.

* Collaborate with security teams to implement and maintain security best practices for Kubernetes and cloud environments.

**Must-Have Qualifications:**

* Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or its equivalent in work experience.

* Minimum of three years of production Kubernetes experience.

* Minimum of three years of cloud engineering experience.

* Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code tools (Terraform required).

* Proven experience designing and operating containerized systems at scale.

**Nice-to-Have Qualifications:**

* Five years of hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production environments, including cluster administration, troubleshooting, and optimization.

* Extensive cloud expertise including EKS, EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, RDS, CloudWatch, Load Balancers, and other core services.

* Advanced Terraform experience - ability to design and implement infrastructure as code strategies, create reusable modules, and manage complex cloud infrastructure.

* Container expertise - deep knowledge of Docker, container networking, service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd), and container security best practices.

* CNCF ecosystem experience - hands-on work with common Kubernetes controllers and CNCF projects such as cert-manager, external-dns, cluster-autoscaler, ingress-nginx, Kyverno, Crossplane, or similar tools for platform automation and management.

* Platform Engineering & Delivery - Advanced skills including the ability to determine platform architecture and design strategies, implement automated testing and validation, use monitoring and feedback loops to ensure platform reliability, and maintain high availability of production systems.

* CI/CD pipeline experience - hands-on work with Jenkins, GitLab CI, ArgoCD, Flux, or similar tools for building automated deployment pipelines for containerized applications.

* Experience with microservices architectures and supporting infrastructure including API gateways, service discovery, and distributed tracing.

* Observability tools - experience with Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK stack, Datadog, or similar monitoring and logging platforms.

* Experience with Helm charts and Kubernetes operators for application deployment and management.

* Strong understanding of networking including Kubernetes networking models, CNI plugins, ingress controllers, and cloud networking services.

* Experience working with highly collaborative, Agile teams in a DevOps or platform engineering capacity.

* Eagerness and willingness to learn new cloud-native technologies and stay current with the Kubernetes ecosystem.

* **Problem Solving:** Strong problem solver who utilizes data, metrics, and proofs of concepts to find creative solutions to complex infrastructure challenges, reflects on solutions by measuring their impact, and uses that information to optimize platform performance and reliability. Adept at making architectural decisions that involve numerous factors with broad implications.

* **Communication:** Strong communicator who can explain complex Kubernetes and cloud concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences, document platform architecture and procedures clearly, collaborate effectively across teams, quickly identify core issues in technical discussions, give and receive constructive feedback, and ensure all voices are heard; an attentive and empathetic listener.

* **Leadership:** Advanced leadership skills with the ability to take ownership when there is no clear direction, inspire and motivate team members, and effectively influence technical decisions across the organization.

**About Aquent Talent**

Aquent Talent connects the best talent in marketing, creative, and design with the world's biggest brands.

Our eligible talent get access to amazing benefits like subsidized health, vision, and dental plans, paid sick leave, and retirement plans with a match. We also offer free online training through Aquent Gymnasium. More information on our awesome benefits!

Aquent is an equal-opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other legally protected characteristics. We're about creating an inclusive environment-one where different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives are valued, and everyone can contribute, grow their careers, and thrive.

The target hiring compensation range for this role is $53 to $59. Compensation is based on several factors including, but not limited to education, relevant work experience, relevant certifications, and location.

About Aquent Talent:

Aquent Talent connects the best talent in marketing, creative, and design with the world's biggest brands.

Our eligible talent get access to amazing benefits like subsidized health, vision, and dental plans, paid sick leave, and retirement plans with a match. We also offer free online training through Aquent Gymnasium. More information on our awesome benefits!

Aquent is an equal-opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other legally protected characteristics. We're about creating an inclusive environment-one where different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives are valued, and everyone can contribute, grow their careers, and thrive.

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