Principal Platform Engineer (Kubernetes)

About our Client

A dynamic cloud cost optimization partner that blends the power of group buying, smart commitment management, and expert consulting with advanced analytics—empowering businesses to unlock maximum value from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud while significantly reducing costs.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

• Serve as Kubernetes's principal architect and most senior hands-on engineer.

• Set architectural standards and code quality bars; mentor engineers through technical pairing and design reviews.

• Drive technical roadmap and architecture decisions in partnership with Product Management

Hands-On Engineering

• Write production Go code for Kubernetes's core systems: agent data collection, metrics processing, cost allocation engine

• Design and implement custom Kubernetes controllers and operators

• Build and optimize the Click House time-series data model for cost metrics at scale

• Implement gRPC streaming with backpressure, circuit breakers, and mTLS between agent and datastore

• Develop Karpenter-based node optimization policies and consolidation algorithms

• Performance-tune the metrics pipeline: 10-second scrape intervals, 1-minute rollups, multi-cluster aggregation

Technical Strategy

• Design the agent data collection layer — hybrid metrics collection via Metrics API, Kubelet Summary, Kubelet Proxy, and optional Prometheus endpoints

• Architect the Click

House time-series schema with materialized views for multi-resolution aggregation (5m, 1h, 1d)

• Build the delta processing pipeline — in-memory state comparison with ring buffers discovery 10K, metrics 50K, events 100K)

• Design cost allocation algorithms for shared resources — control plane, networking, system namespaces, idle capacity

• Architect multi-cloud Kubernetes support (EKS primary, AKS/GKE Phase 4) with provider-specific pricing API integrations

Key Requirements

• 10+ years in systems/platform/infrastructure engineering with deep hands-on Kubernetes production experience (EKS, AKS, or GKE)

• Experience building Kubernetes tooling: operators, controllers, CLI tools, or platform products

• Prior work on cost/resource optimization, observability, or infrastructure intelligence platforms preferred

• Experience with container orchestration at scale- multi-cluster, multi-cloud preferred

• Expert-level: Kubernetes internals (scheduler, controller-manager, kubelet, API server),

• resource management, pod lifecycle

• Hands-on: Custom controller/operator development using controller-runtime or client-go

• Production experience with Karpenter, Open

Cost, or equivalent node/cost optimization tools

• Strong Go proficiency; experience with gRPC, Protocol Buffers

• Click

House or similar OLAP/time-series database experience for high-throughput metrics

• eBPF, CNI, or CSI plugin development experience is a strong plus

• Ability to operate in a "founding engineer" mode — small team, high ownership, rapid shipping

• Track record of setting technical direction and architectural standards that scale beyond your own code

• Comfortable wearing multiple hats: architecture, implementation, code review, technical documentation, product input

• Influence through technical excellence, design documents, and working code- not through organizational authority

• Strong communicator who can influence across functions and levels

On Offer

• Greenfield Build: Build a Kubernetes Fin

Ops product from the ground up within a revenue-generating company - startup speed with enterprise stability

• Competitive salary for the right candidate