SRE Platform Engineer

Job Description Summary The Platform System Reliability Engineer is the primary operations engineer and operator of our EKS Kubernetes environment, which serves as the foundation for our global grid software SaaS products. This role focuses on the "middle-mile" of software delivery, ensuring that the underlying compute, networking, and storage layers are secure, hardened, scalable, and resilient to support critical energy infrastructure in the cloud. You will be responsible for the full lifecycle of production clusters, from initial bootstrapping, performance tuning, patching and securing. Job Description Roles and Responsibilities Day 0: Provision & Infrastructure Hardening Kubernetes Cluster Orchestration: Help design and deploy hardened EKS clusters across multiple AWS regions, ensuring consistent security baselines. Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Build and maintain reusable Terraform and Ansible modules for automated provisioning of cloud infrastructure services including networking services, compute, storage, queue and cache, etc. Security Architecture: Implement "Policy as Code" guardrails and secure network perimeters (ESPs) in alignment with NERC CIP and IEC 62443 standards. Operationalize Cloud Infrastructure: Standardize run books, operating processes required to run critical infrastructure with highest reliability. Day 1: Platform Readiness & Scaling Resource Governance: Define and enforce Kubernetes resource quotas, limit ranges, and Pod Priority classes to ensure mission-critical services receive prioritized compute resources. Connectivity & Ingress: Manage the ingress strategy and service mesh architecture to facilitate secure, performant connectivity between distributed micro services. Acceptance Testing: Lead platform-level smoke, load testing and disaster recovery exercises to validate that the infrastructure can meet 99.99% uptime targets. Sizing & Optimization: Partner with application teams to right-size containerized workloads, optimizing for both performance and cloud cost (FinOps). Day 2: Operational Excellence & Tier 3 Support L3 Escalation: Act as the highest technical escalation point for complex Kubernetes internals, troubleshooting issues such as failed pods, memory leaks, and network partitions. Incident Response: Lead root cause analysis (RCA) for platform-level outages, implementing systemic fixes to prevent recurring failures. Toil Elimination: Proactively identify and automate repetitive operational tasks—such as cluster upgrades and OS patching—to ensure the team spends at least 50% of their time on engineering improvements. Observability Integration: Institutionalize platform monitoring using Prometheus and Grafana, creating dashboards that surface the "Golden Signals" of cluster health. Technical Requirements Kubernetes: 5 years of experience operating production-grade Kubernetes clusters at scale. Orchestration & Observability Tools: Expert-level knowledge of multi-cluster management, performance tuning and experience implementing observability tools such as Prometheus/Grafana, Dynatrace, Splunk, Datadog, etc. AWS Infrastructure: Deep hands-on experience with AWS core services (EKS, EC2, ALB, S3, RDS, MSK). Automation Stack: Proficiency in Terraform, Ansible, and Python or Go for infrastructure automation and deployment tools like ArgoCD or Flux. Networking & Security: Strong understanding and hands on experience of cloud networking concepts such as VPCs, routing, load balancing and security configurations such as encryption, certificate management. Education Qualification Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or “STEM” Majors (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) with advanced experience. Experience Professional Background: 6–8 years in SRE or Platform Engineering roles supporting mission-critical, 24/7 cloud environments. Crisis Management: Proven track record as a structured incident responder who can handle production down/break the glass scenarios in mission critical applications. Preferred Qualifications Regulated Environments: Practical knowledge of NERC CIP, SOC2, ISO 27001, or IEC 62443 compliance standards in a SaaS context. Certifications: AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional, CKA (CertifiedKubernetes Administrator), or SRE Practitioner Certification. Critical Infrastructure: Experience supporting mission-critical systems in energy, utilities, or other high-stakes industrial sectors. Business Acumen: Understand key cross-functional concepts that impact the organization; is aware of business priorities and organizational dynamics Leadership: Coach and mentor team members. Familiar with concepts of costing hardware and software components. Works to assure work is on-time and within budget Deliver tasks on-time with alignment to architectural goals. Can identify and raise issues, risks and benefits Participate in change initiatives by implementing new directions and providing appropriate information and feedback Personal Attributes: High level of ene