Azure Platform Engineer, Remote Ontario

Responsibilities:

• Act as the subject-matter expert (SME) for Kubernetes deployments, troubleshooting, and production issues across all environments.
• Design and deploy Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters with private cluster configurations, managed identities, and RBAC.
• Own the health, scaling, and lifecycle management of production AKS clusters, including upgrades, node pool management, autoscaling, and capacity planning.
• Configure AKS networking, including Azure CNI, internal load balancers, and ingress controllers (NGINX, Traefik).
• Design and maintain integrations between AKS with Azure Container Registry (ACR), Key Vault via CSI driver, Azure Monitor for containers, Azure SQL, Kafka/Event Hubs, Azure Storage, and other client-facing dependencies (DNS resolution, firewall rules, private endpoints, and service connectivity).
• Manage containerized application deployments using Docker and Helm; maintain reusable chart and templating standards, namespaces, resource quotas, and Azure Policy for AKS.
• Harden AKS environments through policy enforcement, network policies, and image scanning.
• Own container and cluster vulnerability management: scanning, triage, prioritization, and remediation coordination with engineering teams.
• Contribute to Terraform-based infrastructure as code for provisioning and managing Azure resources.
• Support Azure DevOps (or equivalent) CI/CD pipelines, including GitOps workflows (Flux/ArgoCD), to reduce deployment risk and improve release velocity.
• Design, implement, and manage observability across the Grafana stack (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo) and Azure-native tooling (Azure Monitor, Log Analytics Workspace, Application Insights) for critical systems; define SLIs/SLOs and tune alerting to reduce noise.
• Collaborate with performance engineering and application teams to identify, diagnose, and resolve performance bottlenecks spanning the AKS platform and its dependent services (database, messaging, network) to right-size node pools and workloads based on observed performance and utilization trends.
• Contributing to Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning (DR/BCP) procedures for AKS-hosted workloads, including cross-team failover drill participation and RTO/RPO validation.
• Provide escalation support for production Kubernetes and infrastructure incidents; participate in on-call rotation, lead root-cause analysis, and drive preventative follow-up actions.
• Document runbooks and post-incident reviews, and operational knowledge; maintain a living knowledge base to reduce tribal knowledge.
• 5+ years of hands-on Kubernetes experience
• Strong knowledge of Kubernetes internals: scheduling, networking, storage, RBAC.
• Proficiency in Azure CNI networking and AKS private cluster configuration.
• Hands-on experience with Azure PaaS services (ACR, AKV, Azure SQL, Kafka and Managed Identities) and troubleshooting network-layer dependencies (DNS, firewall, private endpoints).
• Experience with Helm
• Working knowledge of Terraform for infrastructure as code.
• Working knowledge of Azure DevOps or similar CI/CD tooling.
• Practical experience with container/cluster vulnerability management and remediation workflows.
• Scripting skills in Bash and Python.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to convey technical issues clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Additional information

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with Azure PaaS services (ACR, AKV, Azure SQL, Kafka and Managed Identities) and troubleshooting network-layer dependencies (DNS, firewall, private endpoints).
• Experience with Helm