Senior Kubernetes Platform Specialist

🏗 We're Hiring: Senior Kubernetes Platform Specialist

📍 Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

🕒 Employment Type: Full-Time

💼 Experience Level: Mid-Level to Senior

🌐 Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a construction-focused organization committed to delivering complex projects through operational excellence, technology-driven innovation, secure digital infrastructure, and collaborative project delivery. Our distributed teams work across Project Management, Construction, Engineering, Procurement, Commercial, Legal, Finance, Human Resources, Design, Quality, HSE, Consultants, Contractors, Suppliers, Logistics, Administration, Information Technology, and Executive Leadership to support efficient operations and reliable access to business-critical systems.

We recognize that modern application platforms are essential to digital transformation, operational resilience, and cross-functional collaboration. Through cloud-native technologies, automation, container orchestration, robust security controls, and continuous improvement, we aim to build scalable technology platforms that support our business applications, engineering workflows, project management systems, and enterprise services.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Kubernetes Platform Specialist to design, implement, administer, secure, and optimize enterprise Kubernetes platforms supporting containerized applications and cloud-native workloads.

The successful candidate will bring strong expertise in Kubernetes architecture, cluster lifecycle management, container orchestration, infrastructure automation, platform security, observability, networking, storage integration, and production operations. This role will focus on building reliable, scalable, secure, and developer-friendly platforms that enable application teams to deploy and operate workloads efficiently.

The Senior Kubernetes Platform Specialist will collaborate with DevOps, Software Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, Network, Systems Administration, Database, and Application Support teams to establish platform standards, automate operational processes, improve service reliability, and support infrastructure modernization across the organization. The role will also help ensure that platform operations align with internal governance requirements and applicable United Arab Emirates regulations.

Key Responsibilities1. Kubernetes Platform Architecture and Design

• Design, implement, and maintain enterprise Kubernetes platforms for production, development, testing, staging, and disaster recovery environments.
• Develop scalable and resilient cluster architectures aligned with application requirements, business priorities, and organizational technology standards.
• Evaluate cluster topology, node pools, control plane architecture, workload distribution, and resource allocation strategies.
• Design Kubernetes environments for on-premises infrastructure, public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid deployment models where required.
• Assess managed Kubernetes services and self-managed platforms based on operational complexity, security, availability, performance, and cost.
• Establish reference architectures, reusable deployment patterns, platform standards, and technical design guidelines.
• Define cluster sizing and resource requirements based on workload characteristics, expected growth, availability targets, and service criticality.
• Support platform modernization initiatives, container adoption programs, and migration from traditional application hosting environments.
• Identify architectural risks, single points of failure, operational dependencies, and opportunities for platform standardization.
• Maintain architecture diagrams, infrastructure dependencies, platform specifications, and technical decision records.

2. Kubernetes Cluster Administration and Lifecycle Management

• Provision, configure, upgrade, scale, and maintain Kubernetes clusters in accordance with approved operational procedures.
• Manage cluster components, including control plane services, worker nodes, kubelet, API server access, and associated platform dependencies.
• Maintain cluster health, node readiness, workload availability, and the stability of core Kubernetes services.
• Plan and execute Kubernetes version upgrades, node image updates, operating system patching, and component lifecycle activities.
• Assess version compatibility, deprecated APIs, workload dependencies, and upgrade risks before implementing changes.
• Coordinate cluster maintenance windows and communicate potential service impacts to affected stakeholders.
• Validate cluster functionality, application readiness, networking, storage, and monitoring following upgrades or maintenance.
• Manage node pools, labels, taints, tolerations, and workload placement policies.
• Troubleshoot node failures, control plane issues, scheduling problems, resource pressure, and cluster instability.
• Maintain cluster inventories, version records, configuration baselines, support information, and lifecycle plans.
• Develop and test rollback procedures for critical platform changes.
• Ensure cluster configurations remain aligned with approved security, availability, and operational standards.

3. Containerization and Workload Orchestration

• Administer Kubernetes resources, including Pods, Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, Jobs, CronJobs, Services, and ReplicaSets.
• Support the deployment and operation of containerized applications across multiple environments.
• Configure readiness probes, liveness probes, startup probes, resource requests, resource limits, and workload restart policies.
• Implement appropriate horizontal and vertical scaling strategies based on workload behavior and platform capabilities.
• Support workload scheduling, affinity and anti-affinity rules, topology spread constraints, and disruption budgets.
• Troubleshoot failed deployments, image pull errors, crash loops, scheduling failures, and application startup issues.
• Collaborate with development teams to improve container images, deployment configurations, and application runtime reliability.
• Establish consistent deployment conventions, naming standards, labels, annotations, and resource organization.
• Support stateless and stateful workloads while ensuring appropriate storage, availability, and recovery arrangements.
• Evaluate workload configurations for efficiency, resilience, maintainability, and operational suitability.

4. Platform Engineering and Developer Enablement

• Build and maintain reusable platform capabilities that simplify application deployment and operational management.
• Develop standardized deployment templates, Helm charts, Kustomize overlays, and approved application onboarding patterns.
• Establish self-service workflows for authorized teams to provision namespaces, deploy workloads, and access approved platform resources.
• Define platform service catalogs, configuration standards, environment templates, and developer onboarding documentation.
• Work with software engineering teams to understand application requirements and improve the developer experience.
• Reduce unnecessary operational complexity by standardizing common deployment and infrastructure tasks.
• Support internal developer platforms and platform engineering initiatives where applicable.
• Create reusable components for logging, monitoring, secrets integration, ingress configuration, and workload security.
• Establish clear ownership boundaries between platform engineering and application teams.
• Gather feedback from platform users and implement improvements that enhance usability, reliability, and deployment consistency.

5. Infrastructure as Code and Automation

• Develop and maintain infrastructure automation using tools such as Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, and approved configuration management solutions.
• Automate cluster provisioning, node configuration, environment setup, and routine platform maintenance.
• Use declarative configuration and version control to maintain consistent, repeatable platform deployments.
• Develop automation scripts using Python, Bash, PowerShell, or other appropriate tools.
• Implement automated validation, configuration checks, and deployment safeguards.
• Reduce manual intervention in routine operations through approved orchestration and self-service workflows.
• Maintain reusable infrastructure modules, configuration templates, and deployment pipelines.
• Apply peer review, testing, change control, and rollback procedures to infrastructure automation.
• Identify recurring operational tasks suitable for automation and prioritize improvements based on risk and business value.
• Document automation workflows, dependencies, execution procedures, and troubleshooting guidance.

6. CI/CD and GitOps Integration

• Integrate Kubernetes platforms with continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines.
• Support deployment automation using tools such as GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, or equivalent solutions.
• Implement GitOps workflows using tools such as Argo CD or Flux where appropriate.
• Establish controlled promotion of workloads and configuration changes across development, testing, staging, and production environments.
• Implement deployment strategies such as rolling updates, canary releases, and blue-green deployments where supported.
• Configure deployment health checks, automated validation, approval gates, and rollback mechanisms.
• Ensure Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, and platform configuration changes are maintained in approved version-controlled repositories.
• Collaborate with development and security teams to integrate code quality checks, image scanning, and policy validation into delivery pipelines.
• Troubleshoot failed pipelines, deployment synchronization issues, configuration drift, and release-related incidents.
• Improve deployment repeatability, release traceability, and consistency across application environments.