Platform Engineer - Kubernetes & Observability

Platform Engineer – Kubernetes & Observability 3-month contract-to-hire

Location: Irvine, CA (100% onsite)

Pay: $70 - 83/hr (compensation may vary based on experience level)

General Overview We’re seeking a Platform Engineer to help support the reliability, scalability, and day-to-day performance of a shared product platform. The role is heavily centered around Kubernetes with additional opportunity to contribute to a custom observability platform designed to provide engineering teams with greater visibility into application and infrastructure health.

The ideal candidate brings strong hands-on Kubernetes experience and a background operating production environments at scale. While the observability platform includes React, Node.js, and FastAPI components, this position’s primary focus will be Kubernetes and platform engineering, with enough familiarity across the application stack to make meaningful contributions when needed.

Responsibilities Kubernetes & Platform Engineering

• Deploy, maintain, and scale containerized applications across multiple production Kubernetes clusters.
• Help ensure the reliability, availability, and performance of shared platform services.
• Manage application packaging and deployments using Helm.
• Identify opportunities to automate recurring operational tasks and implement self-healing solutions.

Observability Platform:

• Support the continued development and expansion of a custom observability platform, including monitoring, dashboards, and distributed tracing.
• Develop and improve monitoring capabilities across Kubernetes clusters and cloud-native services to identify performance, scaling, and resiliency concerns proactively.
• Make updates and contribute across the platforms React, Node.js, and FastAPI components as required.

DevOps & Automation:

• Support CI/CD workflows and GitOps-driven testing and deployment processes.
• Automate infrastructure and application configuration through infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Implement automated health checks, recovery mechanisms, and failover processes to help enable zero-downtime deployments and updates.

Collaboration & Technical Enablement:

• Work closely with engineering teams to promote effective practices around reliability, observability, and DevOps.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship related to platform and operational best practices.
• Create and maintain platform documentation, standards, architecture guidance, and operational runbooks.

Requirements

• 6-7+ years of hands-on experience working with Kubernetes in production, including deploying, operating, and scaling workloads across multiple clusters.
• Strong experience with Helm and Kubernetes application packaging.
• Solid understanding of DevOps and GitOps methodologies, including CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and automated deployment tools such as ArgoCD.
• Experience working with a major public cloud platform; AWS preferred, including EKS, IAM, and object storage services.
• Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemtry.
• Ability to work effectively with and contribute to a custom observability application built with React, Node.js, and FastAPI.
• Strong troubleshooting and analytical capabilities, particularly with complex, distributed environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related disciplines.
• Experience working with service mesh technologies such as lstio and managing multi-cluster Kubernetes environments.
• Experience using Python for scripting, automation, or operational tooling.
• Familiarity with event-streaming technologies such as Kafka.
• Demonstrated technical leadership experience and a track record of contributing to initiatives involving multiple engineering teams.