Platform Engineer (Kubernetes & Observability)

Job Title: Platform Engineer – Kubernetes & Observability

Location: Location: Irvine, CA, 100% onsite  

Duration: Engagement: 3-month contract-to-hire, with intended conversion to full-time.

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.