Senior Kubernetes Engineer / Platform Administrator

Senior Kubernetes Engineer / Platform Administrator

Washington, DC (Bolling AFB) - onsite Active Top Secret with SCI eligibility We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Kubernetes Engineer / Platform Administrator to lead the design, deployment, and sustainment of containerized application platforms. This role is responsible for building and maintaining highly available, secure, and scalable Kubernetes environments that support mission-critical workloads. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in Kubernetes administration and platform engineering, with additional experience in observability, automation, and distributed systems. This role is ideal for a senior engineer who thrives in complex Kubernetes environments, with the ability to design, operate, and optimize large-scale container platforms while supporting modern application architectures.

Key Competencies:

• Platform engineering and systems thinking
• Automation-first mindset
• Operational reliability and performance optimization
• Strong communication and cross-team collaboration
• Ability to operate independently in high-responsibility environments

Work Environment:

• Hybrid infrastructure environments (on-premises and/or cloud)
• Support of mission-critical systems requiring high availability
• Collaboration with engineering, cybersecurity, and operations teams

Key Responsibilities:

• Kubernetes Platform Engineering (Primary)
• Design, deploy, and manage Kubernetes clusters in enterprise or production environments
• Implement and maintain cluster components including: control plane services, worker node lifecycle management, networking (CNI), ingress, and service mesh (as applicable)
• Perform cluster upgrades, patching, and performance tuning
• Manage container orchestration, scaling policies, and workload scheduling
• Implement high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery strategies
• Infrastructure & Automation
• Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code and automation workflows
• Automate deployment pipelines and cluster configuration management
• Support CI/CD integrations for containerized applications
• Build repeatable processes for provisioning and scaling environments
• Security & Compliance
• Implement Kubernetes security best practices including: RBAC, network policies, secrets management, image security and scanning
• Ensure compliance with organizational and regulatory security requirements
• Monitor and remediate vulnerabilities within the container ecosystem
• Monitoring & Observability (Preferred)
• Integrate and maintain monitoring and visualization tools such as Grafana
• Develop dashboards and alerts for cluster health, application performance, and system metrics
• Support logging and telemetry aggregation across distributed systems
• Application Support & Integration
• Work closely with development teams to support containerized application deployments
• Troubleshoot application and platform issues across distributed environments

Required Qualifications:

• Senior-level experience administering Kubernetes in production environments
• Strong understanding of: containerization (Docker or equivalent), Kubernetes architecture and components, cluster networking and storage concepts
• Experience with Linux system administration
• Experience with scripting and automation using Python
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills
• Ability to work in complex, distributed environments

Preferred / Desired Qualifications:

• Experience with observability platforms such as Grafana
• Experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL
• Experience with messaging systems such as RabbitMQ
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or similar)
• Familiarity with DevSecOps practices and CI/CD pipelines
• Experience with service mesh technologies (e.g., Istio)