Senior DevOps Engineer (Kubernetes)

Overview
As part of the global Platform Engineering team at Portainer, this role focuses on supporting and extending enterprise Kubernetes environments deployed across customer-managed infrastructure.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you will lead DevOps engagements with customers, acting as the primary technical owner for Kubernetes workload enablement, deployment automation, and operational reliability.

You will work directly with customer platform and application teams to design, deploy, operate, and scale Kubernetes-hosted services while driving best practices across automation, observability, and platform standardisation.

We are looking for someone with 6+ years of experience who can start within 4 weeks.

Role Scope

This role combines senior engineering delivery with technical leadership. You will:

• Lead DevOps engineering initiatives with customer stakeholders
• Act as the primary technical escalation point for Kubernetes workload and platform challenges
• Drive adoption of scalable deployment patterns and operational best practices
• Mentor and guide other engineers contributing to the engagement
• Maintain direct hands-on ownership of platform and workload engineering

Requirements:
Customer Technical Leadership

• Lead technical engagements with customer platform and engineering teams.
• Own the design and implementation of Kubernetes-based workload deployment models.
• Provide architectural guidance for platform scalability, reliability, and operational maturity.
• Act as the primary technical interface between Portainer engineering and customer stakeholders.

Platform & Workload Engineering

• Design and implement production-ready Kubernetes deployments for both stateless and stateful services.
• Build reusable Helm-based deployment frameworks for shared platform services and application workloads.
• Support migration of VM-hosted services into Kubernetes-native architectures.
• Design deployment models that support multi-tenant and multi-namespace environments.

Day-2 Operations & Reliability Leadership

• Lead troubleshooting and resolution of complex production issues across clusters and workloads.
• Define observability, alerting, and operational standards across customer environments.
• Drive performance optimisation, scalability improvements, and workload stability initiatives.
• Conduct incident reviews and identify long-term reliability improvements.

DevOps & Developer Enablement

• Partner with application teams to improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation.
• Define and implement progressive deployment strategies such as blue/green and canary releases.
• Standardise deployment processes using GitOps and Infrastructure as Code.
• Mentor teams in adopting cloud-native delivery practices.

Platform Automation & Extension

• Lead development of reusable automation tooling using Terraform, Helm, and scripting.
• Design or implement Kubernetes operators, controllers, or admission webhooks when required.
• Contribute to internal platform standards and engineering frameworks.

Skills & Qualifications

Experience

• Minimum 6+ years of experience in DevOps, Platform Engineering, or SRE roles.
• Demonstrated experience leading or owning technical delivery within customer or stakeholder-driven environments.
• Strong experience operating Kubernetes in production environments.

Kubernetes & Cloud Native

• Deep understanding of Kubernetes architecture and control-plane components.
• Experience deploying and managing stateful workloads using StatefulSets and persistent storage.
• Strong knowledge of ingress, service mesh, container networking, and storage integration.

Deployment & Automation

• Strong experience with Helm, Kustomize, and GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Flux, or similar).
• Experience designing repeatable service deployment frameworks.
• Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or similar tools.

Programming & Automation

• Strong scripting skills (Bash, Python, or similar).
• Experience building Kubernetes operators or controllers is highly desirable.
• Experience working with Go is advantageous.

Observability & Reliability

• Experience implementing monitoring and alerting using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Victoria Metrics, or similar.
• Strong understanding of SRE principles including SLIs, SLOs, and incident response.

Ideal Candidate Profile

• Senior hands-on engineer comfortable leading technical delivery with customers.
• Strong ownership mindset with experience driving reliability and operational excellence.
• Comfortable mentoring engineers and shaping engineering standards.
• Experienced in balancing platform engineering with application deployment challenges.
• Strong communicator capable of working across distributed teams and stakeholders.

Nice to Have

• Experience designing platform services such as messaging systems, workflow engines, databases, or monitoring stacks on Kubernetes.
• Experience modernising legacy or VM-based workloads into Kubernetes.
• Experience working in consulting, managed services, or customer-facing platform teams.

What Success Looks Like

• Customers successfully deploy and operate Kubernetes-hosted services using standardised, scalable patterns.
• Application teams deliver software faster and with fewer production incidents.
• Platform environments become more automated, observable, and operationally mature.
• Engineering best practices are adopted across teams and environments.

Benefits:
Portainer is a leading tech company offering a broad benefits package including a highly competitive salary and the ability to work anywhere in the world while still being part of a dynamic team taking on some of the most interesting challenges in the technology/infrastructure space.