Platform Engineer

Platform Engineer – Self-Managed Kubernetes Location: London Employment Type: Full-time Working Style: Hybrid – 3 days per week in the London office The Opportunity We are looking for a Platform Engineer with strong hands-on experience building and operating self-managed Kubernetes environments. This is a hands-on infrastructure role focused on designing, deploying, scaling and maintaining Kubernetes-based platforms across private, on-premises and cloud environments. We are specifically looking for someone who has personally provisioned, administered and operated Kubernetes clusters, rather than someone whose Kubernetes experience is limited to deploying applications onto managed services such as EKS, AKS or GKE. What You'll Be Doing Design, build and operate self-managed Kubernetes clusters across private/on-premises and cloud environments.Manage the full Kubernetes cluster lifecycle, including provisioning, upgrades, scaling, maintenance and troubleshooting.Manage cluster infrastructure including control planes, worker nodes, networking, ingress and storage.Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code using Terraform and/or Ansible.Build and improve CI/CD and GitOps workflows using GitHub Actions, ArgoCD and Helm.Develop internal platform services and automation using Python.Monitor and troubleshoot production Kubernetes environments.Improve platform reliability, performance, scalability and observability.Implement backup, disaster recovery and failover strategies.Apply security best practices across Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure.Support demanding compute, data and machine-learning workloads.Contribute to platform architecture and technical strategy. Essential Kubernetes Experience Hands-on experience with self-managed Kubernetes is essential. We are particularly interested in candidates with experience using one or more of: kubeadmKubesprayRancher / RKE / RKE2OpenShiftTanzu / VMware TanzuK3s / MicroK8sCharmed KubernetesOther self-managed Kubernetes distributions or cluster deployment frameworksYour experience should include several of the following: Building/provisioning Kubernetes clusters from scratchControl-plane administrationWorker-node managementKubernetes upgrades and cluster lifecycle managementetcdCNI/networking such as Calico, Cilium or FlannelIngress/load balancing such as NGINX or HAProxyKubernetes networking and NetworkPoliciesPersistent storage / CSI / PVs / PVCsRBAC and cluster securityCluster monitoring and observabilityProduction incident troubleshootingNode replacement and cluster recoveryHigh-availability Kubernetes environments If you are a hands-on Platform Engineer who has built and operated self-managed Kubernetes clusters using technologies such as kubeadm, Kubespray, Rancher/RKE or OpenShift, we'd be interested in hearing from you.