Platform Engineer

Hlx Life Sciences; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 85,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work arrangement

Job summary

HLX Life Sciences in London is seeking a hands-on Platform Engineer to design, deploy, and operate self-managed Kubernetes clusters across private, on-prem and cloud environments. You will own the cluster lifecycle, including provisioning, upgrades, scaling, and maintenance, with strong emphasis on security, reliability, and observability.

You will develop IaC with Terraform/Ansible, and build CI/CD and GitOps workflows using GitHub Actions, ArgoCD and Helm, while coding platform automation in

Qualifications

• Hands-on structuring of self-managed Kubernetes clusters from scratch.
• Experience provisioning and operating Kubernetes control planes and workers.
• Familiarity with CI/CD and GitOps tooling.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and operate self-managed Kubernetes clusters across private/on-prem/cloud.
• Manage full cluster lifecycle: provisioning, upgrades, scaling, maintenance, troubleshooting.
• Handle control plane, worker nodes, networking, ingress and storage.
• Develop IaC using Terraform and/or Ansible.
• Improve CI/CD and GitOps with GitHub Actions, ArgoCD and Helm.
• Develop platform services and automation in Python.
• Monitor and troubleshoot production Kubernetes environments.
• Improve reliability, performance, scalability and observability.
• Implement backup, disaster recovery and failover strategies.
• Apply security best practices across Kubernetes and cloud infra.
• Support compute, data and ML workloads; contribute to platform strategy.

Skills

Hands-on infra

Kubernetes admin

Terraform

Ansible

GitOps

Python

CI/CD

Monitoring

Security best pract.

DR planning

Tools

kubeadm

RKE/RKE2

OpenShift

K3s/MicroK8s

Terraform

Ansible

GitHub Actions

ArgoCD

Helm

Kubectl

Rancher

Job description

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.

Hands-on experience with self-managed Kubernetes is essential.

We are particularly interested in candidates with experience using one or more of:

• kubeadm
• Rancher / RKE / RKE2
• OpenShift
• K3s / MicroK8s
• Other self-managed Kubernetes distributions or cluster deployment frameworks

Your experience should include several of the following:

• Building/provisioning Kubernetes clusters from scratch
• Control-plane administration
• Worker-node management
• Kubernetes upgrades and cluster lifecycle management
• etcd
• CNI/networking such as Calico, Cilium or Flannel
• Ingress/load balancing such as NGINX or HAProxy
• Kubernetes networking and NetworkPolicies
• Persistent storage / CSI / PVs / PVCs
• RBAC and cluster security
• Cluster monitoring and observability
• Node replacement & cluster recovery
• High-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.