Kubernetes Engineer

Job Title: Kubernetes Engineer

Job location: Portland Oregon

Job Duration: 3 Months Contract to Hire

Job Description:

• We are seeking a Kubernetes Platform Engineer to design deploy and operate Kubernetes-based hosting platforms across edge and embedded systems. Youll play a critical role in ensuring our platform is secure scalable and resilient-supporting multi-tenant services and orchestrating workloads across aircraft and ground-based environments. This is a high-impact role for engineers who thrive in cloud-native ecosystems and are passionate about automation security and performance optimization. Experience in the telecom domain and networking is a strong plus.

Job Responsibilities:

• Develop and maintain custom Kubernetes controllers CRDs and operators to extend platform capabilities..
• Integrate Kubernetes with Linux-based infrastructure bootstrapped via PXE OTA and other provisioning methods.
• Deploy and configure K3s clusters across heterogeneous hardware (bare metal ARM/x86 nodes and accelerators).
• Automate cluster provisioning node registration and upgrade workflows.
• Monitor platform health using Prometheus Grafana and Kubernetes Events.
• Enforce network policies RBAC secrets management and container security best practices.
• Optimize Kubernetes performance on constrained hardware and air-gapped systems.
• Troubleshoot container runtimes DNS resolution and overlay networking (e.g. Calico Flannel).

Experience:

• 5 years of experience managing Kubernetes platform components and lifecycle operations.
• Understanding of multi-node hybrid clusters across x86 ARM and accelerators.
• Proficiency with Helm charts and Argo CD for application and platform deployment.
• Strong skills in Go Bash scripting YAML/JSON configuration and REST API development.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes CNI plugins and network policy management.

Mandatory skills:

• Hands-on experience with K3s/Kubernetes deployment and lifecycle management; onprem K8/K3 cluster experience;
• Strong understanding of multi-node hybrid clusters across x86 ARM and accelerators.
• Proficiency with GitOps tools (ArgoCD Flux) and declarative deployment workflows.
• Experience with container runtime configuration (containerd CRI-O Docker).
• Familiarity with Linux OS images networking (CNI) and storage provisioning (CSI).
• Knowledge of infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform Ansible Helm).
• Strong debugging skills for cluster bring-up networking and workload scheduling.