Kubernetes Operations Lead Specialist Engineer

Job Title: Kubernetes Operations Lead Specialist Engineer
Location: Chicago Illinois
Experience: 12 Years
Employment Type: Contract
Interview Type: In-Person or Webcam

The Kubernetes Operations Lead Specialist Engineer will oversee and manage enterprise-level Kubernetes clusters ensuring optimal performance scalability security and reliability of containerized platforms. This role involves leading a team responsible for day-to-day Kubernetes operations automation infrastructure improvements and production support across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The candidate should have senior-level hands-on expertise in Kubernetes DevOps tooling CI/CD pipelines cloud services and container management.

• Lead Kubernetes operations including cluster deployment configuration upgrades scaling monitoring and performance tuning.

• Manage and maintain Kubernetes clusters across cloud and on-prem environments such as AWS Azure or GCP.

• Define and enforce best practices around container orchestration security network policies resource optimization and workload management.

• Implement observability solutions leveraging logging monitoring and tracing tools such as Prometheus Grafana ELK and others.

• Oversee incident response root cause analysis and post-incident reviews to ensure platform reliability.

• Design and automate infrastructure operations using Infrastructure-as-Code tools like Terraform Helm and Ansible.

• Collaborate with development security and operations teams to support DevOps workflows and CI/CD pipeline integration.

• Lead capacity planning resource forecasting performance assessments and upgrade planning.

• Document standards deployment procedures runbooks and operational best practices.

• Mentor junior engineers and function as a technical escalation point.

• 12 years of overall IT experience with at least 6 years in Kubernetes and container orchestration.

• Hands-on experience administering and operating large-scale Kubernetes clusters.

• Strong background in cloud platforms such as AWS Azure or Google Cloud.

• Expertise in Docker Helm charts Terraform YAML configurations and service mesh technologies (e.g. Istio Linkerd).

• Proficiency with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins GitLab CI Argo CD or Tekton.

• Strong knowledge of Linux systems networking concepts load balancers and DNS.

• Experience with observability and monitoring frameworks including Prometheus Grafana ELK OpenTelemetry.

• Familiarity with Kubernetes security standards RBAC policies certificate management and image scanning.

• Solid scripting experience with Bash Python or Go.

• Strong troubleshooting and performance optimization skills.

• Kubernetes certifications such as CKA CKAD or CKS.

• Experience with multi-cluster hybrid cloud or on-prem Kubernetes distributions such as EKS AKS GKE OpenShift or Rancher.

• Knowledge of GitOps methodologies and tools like Argo CD or Flux.

• Experience with disaster recovery backup solutions and high availability architecture.

• Previous team leadership or technical architect experience.

• Familiarity with site reliability engineering concepts and automation frameworks.