Sr Backend Engineer - Kubernetes

Senior Backend Engineer

Location: Hybrid, in office 1–2 days a week (Austin, Tx) Clearance: Must be eligible for Secret

We're looking for a senior backend engineer who has built and run Kubernetes themselves, on their own hardware, and wants to spend their days building.

Our client is growing its first dedicated platform engineering team, building a data platform that runs at the edge and in disconnected, air-gapped environments for government customers.

You'll write backend services that take in high volumes of data and own how they're packaged and deployed onto clusters with no internet access and no cloud services to lean on.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role with real technical ownership and peer mentorship; you'll be one of the senior engineers the team is built around.

What you'll bring

• 7+ years of software engineering with significant time on backend systems, writing production code in a language such as Go, C, C++, Java or C#.
• Hands-on experience setting up and running Kubernetes clusters yourself, outside managed services like EKS, GKE or AKS.
• Working experience of Kubernetes internals: image registries, CRDs and operators, persistent volumes and storage classes, and high availability.
• Experience writing Helm charts that deploy a complete application, and designing systems that handle large data volumes without cloud-managed services.
• Independence: if your manager were out for a week, your work would still ship. You ask for help early and explain tradeoffs clearly to non-engineers.
• Strong coding fundamentals. You use AI tools to move faster and know what good code looks like without them.

Nice to have

• Kubernetes in fully air-gapped or disconnected environments, including lightweight distributions such as K3s.
• Go and protobuf/gRPC; embedded or edge computing.
• Time on an infrastructure or platform team on top of a backend career; government or defense programs.