Senior Cloud Platform Architect AWS EKS & API Containerization

We are looking for a senior hands-on architect to lead the containerization of a large-scale API estate for an enterprise financial services client and turn an approved AWS EKS reference architecture into a secure repeatable production platform. This is an architect-who-builds role: you will write and review Terraform Helm Kustomize Flux and Istio policy and stay close enough to the code pipelines and operational data to prove the platform works. Application images stay stateless and portable; the platform owns transport security identity routing secrets telemetry admission policy and rate limiting.

EKS platform. A repeatable multi-AZ EKS Auto Mode foundation and golden path VPC CNI Karpenter KEDA reusable Terraform/Helm/Kustomize modules implemented documented and operable by SRE.

GitOps delivery. Flux as the sole production path: continuous reconciliation signed digest-pinned images GitLab CI and Artifactory integration Flagger SLO-gated canaries no ClickOps.

Service mesh. Istio Ambient istiod istio-cni ztunnel opt-in waypoints SPIFFE workload identity strict mTLS AuthorizationPolicy default-deny NetworkPolicy with measured latency and overhead.

API gateway and containerization. A single governed north-south ingress (Tyk Self-Managed Operator-driven from Git): authentication rate limits routing REST-to-gRPC transcoding and migration of existing APIs onto the platform.

Security and audit. Pod Security Standards Kyverno admission policy EKS Pod Identity Secrets Manager/CSI KMS cert-manager image signing and SBOMs plus a durable billing/audit capture path (Kinesis Firehose S3 Object Lock) with an approved load-tested reliability contract.

Contracts and operations. gRPC/Protobuf as the east-west standard with buf breaking-change checks; SLOs error budgets and OpenTelemetry-based metrics logs and traces built into the platform.

Technical leadership. Architecture decision records threat models and standards; coaching platform SRE and application engineers; representing Opplane in client architecture reviews.

12 years in software infrastructure or platform engineering including 5 years of hands-on production Kubernetes on AWS EKS architecture operations networking upgrades scaling and incident troubleshooting.

A proven track record of standing up EKS platforms end to end and containerizing existing API workloads onto them at enterprise scale.

Strong IaC and Kubernetes configuration skills (Terraform Helm Kustomize) and reusable platform-module design with defensible architecture decisions and cross-team leadership in a regulated environment.

Production service mesh ownership Istio architecture policy rollout performance troubleshooting; Ambient mode especially relevant.

Deep GitOps experience with continuous reconciliation drift management and environment promotion; able to implement the target model in Flux.

Practical Kubernetes and AWS security: PSS policy as code NetworkPolicy IAM Pod Identity KMS certificate management image signing SBOMs.

API gateway and regulated audit/event-ingestion design; able to own a self-managed gateway (direct Tyk experience strongly preferred).

Working knowledge of gRPC HTTP/2 and Protobuf plus enough Java 21 / Spring Boot familiarity to review the reference runtime pattern.

Observability depth across metrics logs traces SLOs and rollout analysis with OpenTelemetry; performance validation at tens of thousands of TPS.

• Tyk Operator/Pump and custom Go or gRPC plugins
• Flux image automation
• Flagger progressive delivery
• Kinesis/Firehose/S3 Object Lock compliance-grade event capture
• Graviton Kubecost/OpenCost and cloud-cost optimization
• Fluent Bit AMP Splunk Honeycomb Grafana
• PCI-scoped SOC 2 or fintech platform engineering
• AWS Solutions Architect Professional CKA/CKS

Remote within the US California preferred for occasional client-site workshops and readiness reviews. Requires US Pacific hours overlap an escalation rotation during build-out and client background screening. Opplane Inc. is an equal opportunity employer.

Opplane delivers advanced data and platform solutions for financial services telecommunications and reg-tech accelerating their digital transformation. Our leadership team is made up of Silicon Valley serial entrepreneurs and executives with deep experience at PayPal Xerox PARC Amazon Wells Fargo and SoFi. We are a small fast-moving multicultural team that values ownership over formality.

Global & Multicultural Diverse perspectives global collaboration (US Portugal India and Singapore offices)
Startup Energy Fast-moving impact-driven environment
Ownership Mindset Engineers own what they build
Collaborative & Friendly Open curious and supportive culture