Lead AKS Platform Engineer

Role overview

Platform engineering responsibilities

• Design and maintain AKS topologies, system and workload node pools, networking, and storage; manage upgrades, node-image updates, patching, and drift through controlled changes.
• Build versioned Terraform modules and Small, Medium, Large, and Critical workload profiles so squads can onboard through configuration-driven workflows without routine cluster-admin access.
• Enforce tenant isolation using namespaces, RBAC, network policies, resource quotas, and pod security controls.
• Integrate private clusters, DNS, controlled ingress and egress, Entra Workload Identity, Key Vault, and container registries with enterprise landing zones.
• Own Helm and manifest standards, GitOps workflows, admission validation, and runtime patterns for APIs, agent workers, and batch or event-driven jobs; collaborate with DevSecOps on CI/CD.
• Implement zone-aware availability, pod disruption budgets, backups, and disaster recovery to meet agreed SLOs and RTOs.
• Manage HPA, KEDA, and Cluster Autoscaler; run load and endurance tests with NFR engineers and optimize capacity and cost with FinOps.
• Establish metrics, logs, and tracing; support on-call and incident response, lead root-cause analyses with SRE and Run teams, review changes, and coach platform adopters.

Must-have qualifications

• At least 8 years in infrastructure, cloud, or platform engineering.
• At least 6 years with Kubernetes or containers.
• At least 3 years of hands-on production AKS engineering.
• Proven record leading cluster design, upgrades, major incident resolution, and reusable multi-team automation.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, IT, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in a regulated industry is preferred.
• CKA and Azure Administrator or Solutions Architect certifications are preferred; CKS, Terraform Associate, and ITIL Foundation are desirable.