Senior Platform Engineer (Kubernetes)

A financial firm is looking for a Senior Platform Engineer (Kubernetes) to join their team in Jersey City, NJ. 

Compensation: $140-190k 
Must be a U.S. Citizen or GC Holder; No visa sponsorship
5 days/week onsite in Jersey City - candidates must be local

Responsibilities

• Design and implement infrastructure abstractions and APIs that simplify deploying AI workloads using Kubernetes-native operations and GitOps patterns.

• Architect, deploy, and manage Kubernetes platforms (AWS EKS and Red Hat OpenShift) across different environments.

• Implement GitOps workflows with ArgoCD to manage declarative app deployments.

• Design and operate middleware infrastructure:

  • Highly available Kafka clusters (mirroring, partitioning, tooling)

  • Managed Redis Enterprise clusters (sharding, high availability, replication)

  • 3Scale API Gateway development and administration

• Build and manage helm charts, templating, parameterization, and versioning for both platform and middleware stacks.

• Enforce container security and policy governance using policies-as-code tools (e.g. OPA, Kyverno), scanning (e.g. Clair, Snyk), and automated admission controls.

• Implement network policies (Kubernetes NetworkPolicy / Calico) to enforce segmentation and micro segmentation.

• Configure and manage service mesh (e.g. Istio, Linkerd) for observability, traffic controls, and secure service to service communication.

• Conduct capacity planning, cluster sizing, resource tuning, and autoscaling strategies.

• Conduct architecture reviews, train engineers, and drive platform best practices across teams.

• Partner with SREs to define platform SLAs, uptime targets, resilience benchmarks, and alerting/monitoring.

• Lead incident response and root cause analysis, automating recovery workflows and improving platform resiliency.

Qualifications
Required:

• 15 years of overall engineering experience, including:

  • At least 8 years with Kubernetes platforms (EKS, OpenShift) in production.

  • Experienced in managing streaming and caching infrastructure at scale (Kafka, Redis Enterprise Clusters).

  • Prior hands-on administration or development of API Management / Gateway platforms - preferably Red Hat 3Scale

• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams to deploy AI workloads on Kubernetes or cloud-native platforms.

• Deep knowledge of DevSecOps principles, container security, governance, and compliance in enterprise environments.

• Strong automation experience: Helm, GitOps, ArgoCD, IaC (Terraform/AWS-CloudFormation/Ansible).

• Experience configuring service mesh, network policy controls, and multi-tenancy in Kubernetes.

• Demonstrated expertise in scripting languages such as Python, Bash, Groovy, or equivalent; hands on experience developing automation tooling, custom Kubernetes operators/controllers, or other platform level integrations. A candidate with a software development background or experience building production-grade automation frameworks is strongly preferred.

• Thorough understanding of core Kubernetes concepts, and observability tooling.

• Demonstrated experience in capacity planning, cluster sizing, and performance tuning for critical infrastructure.

• Strong troubleshooting skills across Kubernetes, middleware, and distributed systems; experienced in leading incident response and root cause analysis.

Preferred

• EKS and/or OpenShift administration certification (CKA, AWS Certified Kubernetes Administrator, Red Hat Certified OpenShift Administrator, or equivalent).

• Knowledge of middleware architecture for high-throughput, low-latency messaging systems.

• Experience with cloud cost optimization, chargeback models.

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions), alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Splunk or similar tools/platforms).

• Familiarity with CNCF ecosystem tools and emerging trends in platform engineering and cloud-native environment.