The Platform System Reliability Engineer is the primary operations engineer and operator of our EKS Kubernetes environment, which serves as the foundation for our global grid software SaaS products. This role focuses on the "middle-mile" of software delivery, ensuring that the underlying compute, networking, and storage layers are secure, hardened, scalable, and resilient to support critical energy infrastructure in the cloud. You will be responsible for the full lifecycle of production clusters, from initial bootstrapping, performance tuning, patching and securing.
Roles and Responsibilities
Day 0: Provision & Infrastructure Hardening
Kubernetes Cluster Orchestration: Help design and deploy hardened EKS clusters across multiple AWS regions, ensuring consistent security baselines.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Build and maintain reusable Terraform and Ansible modules for automated provisioning of cloud infrastructure services including networking services, compute, storage, queue and cache, etc.
Security Architecture: Implement "Policy as Code" guardrails and secure network perimeters (ESPs) in alignment with NERC CIP and IEC 62443 standards.
Operationalize Cloud Infrastructure: Standardize run books, operating processes required to run critical infrastructure with highest reliability.
Day 1: Platform Readiness & Scaling
Resource Governance: Define and enforce Kubernetes resource quotas, limit ranges, and Pod Priority classes to ensure mission-critical services receive prioritized compute resources.
Connectivity & Ingress: Manage the ingress strategy and service mesh architecture to facilitate secure, performant connectivity between distributed micro services.
Acceptance Testing: Lead platform-level smoke, load testing and disaster recovery exercises to validate that the infrastructure can meet 99.99% uptime targets.
Sizing & Optimization: Partner with application teams to right-size containerized workloads, optimizing for both performance and cloud cost (FinOps).
Day 2: Operational Excellence & Tier 3 Support
L3 Escalation: Act as the highest technical escalation point for complex Kubernetes internals, troubleshooting issues such as failed pods, memory leaks, and network partitions.
Incident Response: Lead root cause analysis (RCA) for platform-level outages, implementing systemic fixes to prevent recurring failures.
Toil Elimination: Proactively identify and automate repetitive operational tasks—such as cluster upgrades and OS patching—to ensure the team spends at least 50% of their time on engineering improvements.
Observability Integration: Institutionalize platform monitoring using Prometheus and Grafana, creating dashboards that surface the "Golden Signals" of cluster health.
Technical Requirements
Kubernetes: 5 years of experience operating production-grade Kubernetes clusters at scale.
Orchestration & Observability Tools: Expert-level knowledge of multi-cluster management, performance tuning and experience implementing observability tools such as Prometheus/Grafana, Dynatrace, Splunk, Datadog, etc.
AWS Infrastructure: Deep hands-on experience with AWS core services (EKS, EC2, ALB, S3, RDS, MSK).
Automation Stack: Proficiency in Terraform, Ansible, and Python or Go for infrastructure automation and deployment tools like ArgoCD or Flux.
Networking & Security: Strong understanding and hands on experience of cloud networking concepts such as VPCs, routing, load balancing and security configurations such as encryption, certificate management.
Education Qualification
Experience
Professional Background: 6–8 years in SRE or Platform Engineering roles supporting mission-critical, 24/7 cloud environments.
Crisis Management: Proven track record as a structured incident responder who can handle production down/break the glass scenarios in mission critical applications.
Preferred Qualifications
Regulated Environments: Practical knowledge of NERC CIP, SOC2, ISO 27001, or IEC 62443 compliance standards in a SaaS context.
Certifications: AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional, CKA (CertifiedKubernetes Administrator), or SRE Practitioner Certification.
Critical Infrastructure: Experience supporting mission-critical systems in energy, utilities, or other high-stakes industrial sectors.
Business Acumen:
Understand key cross-functional concepts that impact the organization; is aware of business priorities and organizational dynamics
Leadership:
Coach and mentor team members.
Familiar with concepts of costing hardware and software components. Works to assure work is on-time and within budget
Deliver tasks on-time with alignment to architectural goals. Can identify and raise issues, risks and benefits
Participate in change initiatives by implementing new directions and providing appropriate information and feedback
Personal Attributes:
High level of energy and enthusiasm with the ability to thrive in a rapidly changing environment
Demonstrated customer focus – evaluates decisions through the eyes of the customer; builds strong customer relationships; creates processes with customer viewpoint; partners with customers
Change oriented –actively generates process improvements; champions and drives change initiatives; confronts
Ability to work with global teams, act independently and as part of a team
Apply values, policies, procedures and precedent to make timely, routine decisions of limited, clear choice
Open-mindedly to new perspectives or ideas. Consider different or unusual solutions when appropriate
Resolve day-to-day issues related to strategy implementation. Escalate issues that impact the client and/or strategic initiatives
Strong analytical and strong problem solving skills - communicates in a clear and succinct manner and effectively evaluates information/data to make decisions; anticipates obstacles and develops plans to resolve
Relocation Assistance Provided: Yes
#LI-Remote - This is a remote position
