Principal Platform Engineer (Kubernetes)

Location: Hybrid, with an average requirement of 2 days per week from an HPE office in Durham, North Carolina, or Fort Collins, Colorado, United States.

Base salary: USD 165,500–313,500 annually in Colorado; USD 157,000–361,000 annually in North Carolina. Variable incentives may also be offered.

Company

hirify.global is an edge-to-cloud technology company developing infrastructure and services for data and applications.

What you will do

• Own Kubernetes platform architecture, reliability, operational behavior, and the most complex platform-level issues.
• Investigate pod failover, scheduling, resource management, service discovery, load balancing, control-plane availability, node recovery, timeouts, and degraded cluster states.
• Lead architecture, design, and implementation of highly available, fault-tolerant, and disaster-resilient platform improvements.
• Develop diagnostic approaches across application, Kubernetes, networking, storage, and infrastructure layers.
• Improve observability through metrics, logs, traces, alerts, dashboards, and health indicators; define and monitor SLOs.
• Lead incident response, root-cause analysis, corrective actions, technical standards, runbooks, mentoring, and cross-functional platform initiatives.

Requirements

• Significant experience designing, building, and operating production Kubernetes platforms.
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes architecture and components, including the API server, control plane, scheduler, controller manager, nodes, kubelet, container runtimes, services, ingress, load balancing, resource management, QoS, affinity, taints, tolerations, topology constraints, pod disruption budgets, and CRI/containerd.
• Strong knowledge of high availability and failure recovery in distributed systems, with experience troubleshooting Kubernetes, networking, infrastructure, and application-service failures.
• Experience diagnosing failover behavior, service timeouts, partial failures, network partitions, degraded cluster states, and Kubernetes cluster upgrades.
• Strong understanding of Linux, networking, DNS, TCP/IP, containers, and storage fundamentals.
• Experience with cloud or on-premises infrastructure, infrastructure as code, automation, platform tooling, or operational frameworks.
• Proficiency in Go, Python, and Bash.
• Strong observability and reliability engineering experience using metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and performance analysis.
• Ability to lead complex cross-organizational initiatives, communicate technical issues to technical and non-technical stakeholders, and drive high-severity incidents through permanent resolution.

Nice to have

• Experience contributing to or extending Kubernetes, container-runtime, networking, or infrastructure projects, including EKS, AKS, GKE, OpenShift, or upstream Kubernetes.
• Experience with service meshes, ingress controllers, CNI plugins, CSI storage, cluster autoscaling, distributed databases, consensus systems, or etcd.
• Experience designing multi-cluster, multi-region, or edge-oriented Kubernetes environments and working with embedded, edge, fleet, or geographically distributed systems.
• Knowledge of Linux performance analysis, kernel behavior, container isolation, chaos engineering, failure injection, load testing, and resilience testing.
• Experience with SLOs, error budgets, production-readiness reviews, reliability governance, GitOps, Argo CD, Flux, Helm, or similar tools.
• Relevant Kubernetes or cloud certifications, such as CKA or CKAD, or equivalent practical experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work model with office attendance averaging two days per week.
• Health and wellbeing benefits supporting physical, financial, and emotional wellbeing.
• Personal and professional development programs supporting career growth and subject-matter expertise.
• Inclusive workplace committed to accessibility, equal opportunity, and varied backgrounds.