Cloud Platform Engineer

Cloud Platform Engineer (AWS / EKS / Terraform)

**Team:** Infrastructure Reports to Head of Infrastructure

About the role
You will build and operate TookiTakis cloud platform: AWS EKS clusters managed as code GitOps-driven delivery with the Argo suite operator-managed data services running on Kubernetes and a Terraform-based self-service layer that lets application teams request infrastructure through reviewed YAML instead of tickets. The job is platform engineering not click-ops everything ships through version control automated pipelines and policy gates.

Requirements
Education
- Required: Bachelors degree in Computer Science Engineering or a related field or equivalent practical experience.
- Preferred: Relevant certifications over a Masters CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) HashiCorp Terraform Associate AWS Solutions Architect Associate or higher.

Experience
- 35 years in cloud platform or DevOps engineering.
- Proven track record running production Kubernetes on a managed cloud (EKS strongly preferred) including stateful workloads.
- Experience operating infrastructure entirely through Infrastructure as Code no console-driven change management.

Technical expertise
- **Kubernetes / EKS:** cluster lifecycle and upgrades autoscaling (Karpenter KEDA VPA) ingress and load balancing IRSA/Pod Identity core add-ons (cert-manager external-dns CoreDNS node-local-dns).
- **GitOps / Argo:** ArgoCD for platform and application delivery (app-of-apps Helm chart authoring sync and rollback strategies) Argo Rollouts for progressive delivery Argo Workflows/Events for automation.
- **Databases and stateful services on Kubernetes:** deploying and operating databases via Kubernetes operators PostgreSQL and MySQL (Percona operators) ScyllaDB Elasticsearch Valkey/Redis Kafka (Strimzi) plus AWS RDS/Aurora where managed services fit better; backup/restore upgrades and capacity management for stateful workloads.
- **Terraform:** authoring reusable versioned tested modules (not just consuming them) variable/output interface design terraform test semantic versioning remote state on S3.
- **CI/CD & automation:** pipeline design in GitHub Actions or GitLab CI; plan/apply automation with Atlantis; policy-as-code gates (OPA/Conftest checkov tflint); pre-merge validation and drift detection.
- **AWS core services:** VPC and network design Route 53 IAM (least-privilege roles and policies) S3 RDS/Aurora.
- **Observability:** Datadog OpenTelemetry (collector and kube-stack) Grafana; alerting hygiene with low false-positive rates; log and event pipelines.
- **Programming:** solid scripting/tooling ability in Python or Go enough to build renderers validators and pipeline tooling not just glue scripts.
- **Nice to have:** data platform tooling (Airflow Spark on Kubernetes Temporal StarRocks) identity and SSO (Keycloak Dex oauth2-proxy) load testing with k6 FinOps practices (tagging standards cost allocation rightsizing).

Soft skills
- Strong problem-solving and analytical abilities; comfortable debugging across the stack (DNS LB cluster workload database).
- Clear written communication design docs runbooks and PR descriptions are first-class deliverables here.
- Collaborative mindset: infrastructure changes ship through peer review and platform decisions are made with (not for) application teams.

Key competencies
- **Platform thinking:** design paved roads that make the secure cost-efficient path the easy path for application teams.
- **Automation-first:** if a task is done twice manually the third time is a pipeline.
- **Ownership:** own services end to end provisioning upgrades incidents cost and documentation.
- **Cost awareness:** treat cloud spend as an engineering metric; tag measure and optimize continuously.
- **Adaptability:** comfortable in a fast-moving environment where the platform itself is under active development.

Success metrics (first 612 months)
- Application teams provision standard infrastructure through the self-service platform with no manual Terraform written by requesters.
- EKS cluster and node-group upgrades executed as routine zero-downtime operations via blue/green rollout.
- Operator-managed data services (PostgreSQL Kafka Elasticsearch etc.) run with tested backup/restore and rehearsed upgrade procedures.
- 100% of infrastructure changes delivered through reviewed policy-gated pipelines zero out-of-band console changes.
- Deployment lead time for platform changes reduced measurably (target: same-day merge-to-production for routine changes).
- Cost visibility established via tagging and dashboards with identified savings executed (rightsizing autoscaling storage tiering).
- Actionable alerting: on-call pages correspond to real incidents; false-positive alerts trend toward zero.
- Mean time to recovery for platform incidents under 30 minutes.

Benefits
- **Competitive salary** aligned with industry standards and experience.
- **Professional development:** certification support (CKA AWS Terraform) and training across cloud platform and data engineering.
- **Comprehensive benefits:** health insurance and flexible working options.
- **Growth opportunities:** career progression within TookiTakis expanding infrastructure and platform organization.