Senior Platform Engineer, Operator

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and evolution of the SMBP Operator's CRD API surface, designing extensions for enterprise needs including status conditions, security contexts, network configuration, and admission validation.
• Design and implement flexible network configuration patterns supporting various ingress controllers, load balancers, and traffic management without prescribing specific Kubernetes components.
• Build observability integration: Prometheus metrics, ServiceMonitor CRDs, Kubernetes Events, and pre-built dashboards.
• Harden security posture: pod security contexts, network policies, supply chain integrity (image signing, SBOM), and auditable configurations.
• Make SMBP deployable across EKS, GKE, AKS, OpenShift, on-prem with OLM support, OperatorHub, and multi-distribution testing.
• Build operational tooling: must-gather diagnostics, kubectl plugins, compatibility matrices, documented upgrade paths.
• Partner with customer-facing teams and engage enterprise customers for deployment requirements and technical escalations.

Requirements

• Production Rust experience with large multi-crate workspaces, async Rust, lifetimes, and ownership in reconciliation loops.
• Deep Kubernetes internals: controllers, reconciliation loops, watches, owner references, finalizers, admission webhooks, status subresources.
• Kubernetes operator development using controller-runtime, kube-runtime, kubebuilder or equivalent.
• Kubernetes networking: Service types, Ingress, IngressClass, ingress controllers, trade-offs with LoadBalancer, Gateway API.
• StatefulSet management: rolling updates, PVC lifecycle, pod disruption budgets, topology changes.
• Observability: Prometheus metrics, ServiceMonitor CRDs, Prometheus Operator.
• Enterprise customer orientation: security reviews, compliance, operational expectations.

Nice-to-Haves

• kube-runtime experience.
• Strimzi (Kafka operator) familiarity.
• Cert-manager integration.
• Property-based testing (proptest).
• OLM and OpenShift operator certification.
• Kubernetes Gateway API.
• Supply chain security: Cosign, SBOM (Syft, SPDX).
• Distributed systems: CRDT, eventually consistent stores, P2P replication.
• Open source contributions to cloud-native, Kubernetes, or Rust tooling.