Senior Platform Engineer

Job Description

Critical Skills to Possess:

Kubernetes & Container Orchestration

• 3+ years of production Kubernetes experience; bare-metal / on-premises

experience is mandatory — cloud-managed Kubernetes experience alone does not

qualify

• Hands-on Helm chart authoring (not just consumption), ArgoCD or equivalent

GitOps tooling, and cert-manager

• Deep understanding of Kubernetes control plane HA: etcd Raft quorum, leader

election, minimum viable node counts

• Experience with MetalLB and Traefik or equivalent bare-metal ingress and load

balancing tools

Messaging & Streaming

• Production hands-on experience with Apache Kafka: topic configuration, partition

sizing, replication factor, consumer group management, KRaft mode

• Solid understanding of consumer lag monitoring and back-pressure patterns under

burst load

• Strong familiarity with MQTT protocol semantics: persistent sessions, QoS levels,

TLS mutual authentication; hands-on experience with EMQX or a comparable

broker at tens-of-thousands of concurrent connections

Data Infrastructure

• Production hands-on experience with PostgreSQL HA: Patroni-based automatic

failover, PgBouncer connection pooling, streaming replication, PITR with

pgBackRest or equivalent

• Working knowledge of Valkey / Redis: cluster mode, TTL-based caching, atomic

counter operations

Observability

• Hands-on deployment and configuration of VictoriaMetrics / Prometheus,

Grafana, Loki, Tempo, and Alertmanager

• Ability to write PromQL / MetricsQL queries and author production Grafana

dashboards from scratch

• Experience configuring alert deduplication and grouping in Alertmanager for high

volume event storms

Security & Secrets

• Hands-on experience with HashiCorp Vault / OpenBao: PKI secrets engine,

Kubernetes auth method, dynamic secrets

• Experience with container image CVE scanning (Trivy or equivalent) and a self

hosted container registry (Harbor or equivalent)

• Understanding of TLS certificate lifecycle management: internal CA, automated

rotation, mTLS between services

CI/CD & GitOps

• Experience building CI pipelines with real service dependency testing

(testcontainers-go or equivalent)

• GitOps workflow discipline: Git as the sole source of cluster state truth, PR-gated

deployment approvals

Programming

• Go (Golang): able to read, debug, and modify existing microservice code — trace

latency issues through service logic, adjust Kafka consumer configuration, update

retry semantics; authoring new services from scratch is not required

• Bash scripting for automation and operational runbooks

• Strong proficiency with YAML / TOML for Kubernetes manifests, Helm values, and

service configuration

Networking

• Understanding of TCP/TLS at scale: TLS handshake cost, session resumption

overhead, connection state memory at 30,000 simultaneous connections

• Working knowledge of data centre networking concepts (MLAG, VLAN, MTU, ToR

design); able to collaborate effectively with a dedicated networking team

Preferred Qualifications:

• BS degree in Computer Science or Engineering or equivalent experience