Platform Engineer

Job Title : Platform Engineer

Location : Irvine, CA

Position Type : 3 month contract-to-hire

Pay Range : $50-55/hr. (or higher/negotiable based on experience)

Summary :

The Platform Engineer plays a critical role in the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of a shared product platform. This role is primarily focused on Kubernetes, with a secondary focus on contributing to a newly built, custom observability platform that gives engineers clear visibility into system and service health.

Responsibilities :

• Deploy, operate, and scale containerized workloads in production Kubernetes environments across multiple clusters.

• Own the reliability, performance, and availability of shared platform services.

• Package and manage applications using Helm.

• Reduce operational toil through automation and self-healing remediation.

• Contribute to and enhance the team's custom observability platform, including dashboards, monitoring, and tracing capabilities.

• Build monitoring for Kubernetes clusters and cloud-native services to surface scaling and resiliency issues before they cause outages.

• Work with the observability application's React, Node.js, and FastAPI components as needed.

• Maintain CI/CD pipelines and GitOps-based automated testing and deployment.

• Automate infrastructure and application configuration using infrastructure-as-code.

• Enable automated health checks and failover to support zero-downtime updates.

• Partner with and mentor engineering teams on reliability, observability, and DevOps best practices.

• Document platform designs, standards, and operational runbooks to support long-term sustainability.

Qualifications :

• 6-7+ years of hands-on Kubernetes experience in production environments, including deploying, scaling, and operating workloads across multiple clusters.

• Experience with Helm-based packaging.

• Solid DevOps and GitOps practice, including CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and automated deployment (for example, ArgoCD).

• Working knowledge of a major public cloud (AWS preferred), including managed Kubernetes (EKS), IAM, and object storage.

• Experience with monitoring and observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry.

• Ability to adapt to and contribute to a custom observability platform built on React, Node.js, and FastAPI.

• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills for diagnosing issues in complex distributed systems.