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Job Summary
We are looking for a Staff Engineer to join the Reliability Engineering team that operates a bare-metal Kubernetes platform across multiple metro locations. The platform's architecture is defined and the build is underway you will provision and operate it day to day: bringing up nodes and clusters, running upgrades, keeping the fleet consistent through GitOps, and owning your shift of the on-call rotation.
This is a deliberately broad role. We are not looking for someone who works one layer and hands everything below it across a boundary. You will work alongside the teams that own the physical hardware, the underlay network, and the data plane software, and you need working knowledge of all three enough to isolate where a problem lives before escalating it.
You will join the Digital Interconnection Engineering organization. The team owns the full application stack for interconnection and the Kubernetes platform for the software-defined data plane across multiple metros. We operate with an automation-first, GitOps-driven culture and a strong commitment to operational rigor, documented runbooks, and blameless postmortems.
Responsibilities
OS Provisioning & Bare-Metal Infrastructure
Provision bare-metal servers across multiple metros using the team's PXE/iPXE imaging and cloud-init pipeline, and harden the OS prior to cluster bootstrap
Extend and maintain that provisioning automation as new hardware, metros and OS versions are introduced, keeping node bring-up free of manual per-node steps
Work with the teams that own the hardware on BIOS/firmware baselines, NIC configuration and disk layout standards, and use BMC/IPMI and platform sensors to isolate hardware faults before handing them over
Kubernetes Cluster Operations
Bring up and operate Kubernetes clusters following the team's established control-plane topology, including etcd members, kube-apiserver HA behind the L4 load balancer or VIP, and defined failure-domain placement
Provision worker nodes, configure CNI, and run end-to-end cluster validation before workloads are onboarded
Perform routine cluster operations: node drains and replacements, certificate rotation, capacity checks, and remediation of cluster-level alerts
GitOps & Fleet Configuration
Make cluster and fleet configuration changes through GitOps, keeping clusters consistent, auditable and drift-free
Perform cluster registration, RBAC and policy changes in the management plane, respecting the isolation between production and nonproduction planes
Extend the deployment pipeline for the software-defined data plane adding validation coverage and test cases working from the pipeline design and gates owned by the senior engineers on the team
Upgrades & Patching
Execute rolling OS and Kubernetes upgrades across the fleet from tested runbooks, with no unplanned downtime, and improve those runbooks as you find gaps
Take etcd snapshots ahead of significant changes, and run scheduled restore drills to prove the recovery path works
Apply the platform's patching cadence across the fleet, tracking CVEs affecting the OS, Kubernetes and cluster components
Observability & On-Call
Own your shift of a follow-the-sun on-call rotation, and act as first responder for control-plane, node, and cluster-level incidents
Build and tune dashboards and alerts for the systems you operate, and reduce alert noise where it is costing the rotation time
Write up incidents you respond to, contribute to blameless…