Platform Engineer - Kubernetes & Observability

Role: Platform Engineer – Kubernetes & Observability
Location: Irvine, CA (Onsite)
Pay rate: $62/Hr on C2H

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About The AES Group
The AES Group is a premier technology and engineering consulting company that has been bringing businesses and talent together for over 20 years to deliver innovative solutions that have the greatest positive impact on society. AES has helped over 40 business enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, engage their customers, empower their employees, and transform their business operations with the power of cloud, data, AI, engineering, and other emerging technologies.

Position Overview

The Platform Engineer plays a critical role in the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of a shared product platform. This role is primarily focused on Kubernetes, with a secondary focus on contributing to a newly built, custom observability platform that gives engineers clear visibility into system and service health.

The successful candidate will operate and scale production Kubernetes environments and help extend the observability platform. Deep Kubernetes expertise matters far more than software development depth. The observability application is built on React, Node.js, and FastAPI, and the candidate should be comfortable working in that stack without being a heavy software developer.
 

Key Responsibilities

Kubernetes & Platform Engineering

· Deploy, operate, and scale containerized workloads in production Kubernetes environments across multiple clusters.

· Own the reliability, performance, and availability of shared platform services.

· Package and manage applications using Helm.

· Reduce operational toil through automation and self-healing remediation.
 

Observability Platform Engineering

· Contribute to and enhance the team's custom observability platform, including dashboards, monitoring, and tracing capabilities.

· Build monitoring for Kubernetes clusters and cloud-native services to surface scaling and resiliency issues before they cause outages.

· Work with the observability application's React, Node.js, and FastAPI components as needed.
 

DevOps & Automation

· Maintain CI/CD pipelines and GitOps-based automated testing and deployment.

· Automate infrastructure and application configuration using infrastructure-as-code.

· Enable automated health checks and failover to support zero-downtime updates.
 

Collaboration & Knowledge Sharing

· Partner with and mentor engineering teams on reliability, observability, and DevOps best practices.

· Document platform designs, standards, and operational runbooks to support long-term sustainability.
 

Required Qualifications

· 6–7+ years of hands-on Kubernetes experience in production environments, including deploying, scaling, and operating workloads across multiple clusters.

· Experience with Helm-based packaging.

· Solid DevOps and GitOps practice, including CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and automated deployment (for example, ArgoCD).

· Working knowledge of a major public cloud (AWS preferred), including managed Kubernetes (EKS), IAM, and object storage.

· Experience with monitoring and observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry.

· Ability to adapt to and contribute to a custom observability platform built on React, Node.js, and FastAPI.

· Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills for diagnosing issues in complex distributed systems.
 

Desired Qualifications

· Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.

· Experience with service mesh (for example, Istio) and multi-cluster environments.

· Python scripting and automation experience.

· Experience with event streaming platforms such as Kafka.

· Demonstrated technical leadership and success on projects involving multiple engineers.