Lead SRE: Azure Cloud & AKS Platform Architect (Remote)

Lumen Technologies, Inc.; Oregon; Remote; USD 111,000 - 148,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Life insurance

Voluntary lifestyle benefits

Job summary

Lumen Technologies, Inc. is seeking a Lead Site Reliability Engineer to drive platform excellence across Azure Public and Azure Government clouds.

You will design, build, and operate AKS clusters with guardrails, implement GitOps, and advance CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins and GitHub Actions. You will own container platform best practices, configure ingress gateways, stand up Prometheus/Grafana, and enforce secure cloud networking and secret management.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in DevOps/Platform/SRE roles.
• 2+ years leading teams or cross-functional initiatives.
• Deep expertise in Azure (Public/Gov) cloud services and resource management.
• Hands-on with AKS, Helm 3, Flux CD (GitOps).
• Experience with Prometheus & Grafana (metrics, alerting, dashboards).
• Proficiency in Nginx and Kong (ingress/API gateway).
• CI/CD automation using Jenkins and GitHub Actions.
• Strong development skills for automation & debugging (Python, Go, or TypeScript; Bash/PowerShell).
• Proven experience with IaC using Terraform (or similar tools like Bicep).
• Ability to obtain GSA Tier 2 Suitability Clearance.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate AKS clusters with enterprise guardrails.
• Implement GitOps with Flux CD; define Helm chart standards and manage lifecycle via Helm 3.
• Own container platform best practices: Docker image standards, multi-stage builds, SBOM, vulnerability scanning, base image governance.
• Configure Nginx and Kong including routing, rate limiting, mutual TLS, JWT/OAuth2 auth, and WAF integration.
• Stand up Prometheus for metrics scraping, alert rules, and exporters; integrate Grafana for dashboards and SLO/SLA visualization.
• Lead Jenkins pipeline automation and GitHub Actions workflows for build/test/deploy, with reusable templates and environment promotion strategies.
• Build infrastructure-as-code and policy-as-code pipelines using Terraform (or similar tools like Bicep), with automated validations, PR gates, and compliance checks.
• Architect and enforce secure integration with Azure Key Vault for secret, key, and certificate management; automate cert-manager/issuer (ACME/PFX).
• Design and implement Azure Networking: VNets, NSGs, route tables, Private Link, Firewall rules, egress control, and traffic segregation in hub-spoke models.
• Operate and integrate Azure Blob Storage, Azure Redis Cache, PostgreSQL, Azure Cosmos DB (Mongo API), and Azure Service Bus.

Skills

Azure

AKS

Flux CD

GitOps

Helm 3

Docker

Prometheus

Grafana

Jenkins

GitHub Actions

Python/Go/TypeScript

Terraform

Bicep

Kong

Nginx

Tools

Kubernetes

Helm 3

Flux CD

Terraform

Azure Key Vault

Job description

Lumen Technologies, Inc. is seeking a Lead Site Reliability Engineer to drive platform excellence across Azure Public and Azure Government clouds.

You will design, build, and operate AKS clusters with guardrails, implement GitOps, and advance CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins and GitHub Actions. You will own container platform best practices, configure ingress gateways, stand up Prometheus/Grafana, and enforce secure cloud networking and secret management.