Platform Engineer (8CDF725)

Referment; Greater London; Vor Ort; GBP 100.000 - 150.000; Vollzeit

Zusammenfassung

Referment is seeking an Infrastructure/Platform Engineer to design, build and operate its on-prem Kubernetes platform. You will work across the VM fabric (KVM/libvirt), cluster lifecycle, storage and networking, with responsibility for multi-tenancy, GitOps delivery and CIS hardening.

You will own etcd control plane operations, CSI storage integration and observability, while coordinating with datacentre and network teams to keep the platform healthy and performant.

Qualifikationen

• Proven experience running Kubernetes in self-managed on-prem context.
• Hands-on Linux admin with networking, storage and kernel tuning.
• Deep knowledge of CNI networking and CSI storage.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and GitOps workflows.
• Comfort with security hardening and secrets management.

Aufgaben

• Design, build and operate the on-prem Kubernetes platform for production workloads.
• Architect VM fabric (KVM/libvirt), networking, storage and golden-image pipelines.
• Automate VM lifecycle and manage capacity planning and headroom for failure.
• Own multi-tenant patterns, CI/CD pipelines and GitOps tooling.
• Ensure observability, incident response and disaster recovery across stack.

Kenntnisse

Kubernetes

Linux

Networking

Storage

Infrastructure as Code

GitOps

Monitoring

Security

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Packer

Ceph

Kubespray

Cluster API

ArgoCD

Jobbeschreibung

Referment is working with a global options market maker whose low-latency trading platform runs on self-managed, on-premises infrastructure rather than public cloud. The firm trades across global derivatives markets, builds its platform on open-source tooling where it fits, and values a flat, collaborative engineering culture.

The Role

You will help design, build and operate the on-premises Kubernetes platform that sits beneath the firm's application workloads — from the hypervisor and VM provisioning up through Kubernetes cluster lifecycle, networking, storage and the golden-path tooling application teams use to ship software. The Linux VM fabric (KVM/libvirt-based) is still being designed and built out, so you will have real influence over its architecture, not just its day-to-day operation, and you will keep the fabric and the clusters running on top of it healthy, secure and performant without the safety net of a hyperscaler's managed control plane. Your work will span the full stack: designing the VM fabric's hypervisor architecture, host networking topology and storage backing; designing and maintaining distributed shared storage such as Ceph; building VM templating and golden-image pipelines; automating the VM lifecycle end to end via infrastructure-as-code; and managing capacity planning, oversubscription strategy and headroom for failure or maintenance. You will own virtual networking within the fabric and its clean handoff into the Kubernetes CNI layer; design, build and maintain the full lifecycle of on-prem Kubernetes clusters (bootstrapping, version upgrades, node scaling, decommissioning) using tooling such as kubeadm, Cluster API or Kubespray; manage the control plane end to end, including etcd operations, backup/restore, performance tuning and disaster recovery; configure CNI, network policy enforcement and on-prem load balancing; stand up ingress and internal DNS; and own persistent storage integration via CSI drivers. You will define and enforce multi-tenancy patterns across both layers, build GitOps-based delivery with ArgoCD or Flux, harden hosts and clusters against CIS benchmarks, manage secrets, build observability across the full stack from hypervisor health to cluster metrics and logs, plan and execute upgrades with minimal workload disruption, troubleshoot incidents from a misbehaving pod down through kubelet, the container runtime and CNI into the underlying VM and hypervisor, share an on-call rotation for platform-level incidents, partner with application teams on developer experience, and coordinate with datacentre and network teams on physical host provisioning.

What We're Looking For

• Solid production experience running Kubernetes in a self-managed, on-premises context (not just EKS/GKE/AKS) — you understand what breaks when there's no managed control plane, and you've operated etcd and the control plane yourself
• Hands-on experience designing and operating a Linux KVM/libvirt-based VM fabric as the foundation for Kubernetes, ideally from a relatively early stage rather than just inheriting a mature environment
• Strong Linux systems administration background: networking, storage, service management, kernel tuning and troubleshooting under pressure
• Practical, in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes networking (CNI internals; service meshes a plus) and storage (CSI drivers, distributed storage systems such as Ceph/Longhorn)
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management (Terraform, Ansible, Packer), GitOps workflows and CI/CD pipelines
• Comfortable with observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/Loki) and using them to diagnose infrastructure issues without cloud-native tooling
• Security-conscious: familiar with hardening standards, RBAC, network segmentation and secrets management
• Strong troubleshooting instincts across the full stack — hypervisor, OS, network, container runtime, Kubernetes control plane — and good written and verbal communication with distributed or hybrid teams

Relevant Desirable Experience

• Bare-metal Kubernetes provisioning; a background in a regulated or air-gapped/restricted-network environment
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure tooling
• Using AI tooling to accelerate development; experience running AI infrastructure

This could suit an infrastructure or platform engineer who likes understanding systems all the way down — from hypervisor to pod — and wants real ownership with no black-box managed services standing between them and root cause.

#Referment