Remote Azure AKS Platform Engineer

United States Digital Space LLC; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote Work Environment

Competitive Salary

Job summary

Smile seeks an Azure Platform Engineer to design, deploy, and operate production-grade AKS clusters, emphasizing cluster internals, networking, security, and reliability. You will own the platform end-to-end from architecture and CI/CD through performance tuning, observability, and incident response, acting as the SME for Kubernetes deployments across environments.

You will collaborate with security and platform teams, use Terraform for IaC, and support Flux/ArgoCD, Grafana stack, and Azure

Qualifications

• Kubernetes SME with production experience in AKS environments.
• Experience deploying and operating AKS with private clusters and RBAC.
• Strong background in CI/CD and GitOps workflows.
• Security hardening and incident response for cloud-native platforms.
• Experience configuring networking and load balancing in AKS.
• Familiarity with Terraform for IaC and Azure services.

Responsibilities

• Act as SME for Kubernetes deployments across all environments.
• Design and deploy AKS clusters with private configurations, managed identities, RBAC.
• Own health, scaling, and lifecycle management of production AKS clusters; upgrades, node pools, autoscaling.
• Configure AKS networking (Azure CNI, internal LB, ingress controllers).
• Design and maintain integrations between AKS and ACR, Key Vault CSI, Azure Monitor, and other deps.
• Manage container deployments with Docker and Helm; maintain charts, namespaces, quotas, and Azure Policy.
• Harden AKS environments via policy enforcement and network policies.
• Own container and cluster vulnerability management and remediation coordination.
• Contribute to Terraform-based IaC for Azure resources.
• Support CI/CD pipelines with Flux/ArgoCD to improve release velocity.
• Design, implement, and manage observability with Grafana stack and Azure tooling; define SLIs/SLOs.
• Collaborate with performance engineering to right-size resources; DR/BCP planning.
• Provide on-call escalation and post-incident reviews; document runbooks and knowledge base.

Skills

Kubernetes SME

AKS expertise

CI/CD

Security hardening

Incident response

Observability

Terraform

GitOps

Networking

RBAC

Tools

Docker

Helm

ACR

Key Vault CSI

Azure Monitor

NGINX

Traefik

Grafana

Prometheus

Loki

Job description

Smile seeks an Azure Platform Engineer to design, deploy, and operate production-grade AKS clusters, emphasizing cluster internals, networking, security, and reliability. You will own the platform end-to-end from architecture and CI/CD through performance tuning, observability, and incident response, acting as the SME for Kubernetes deployments across environments.

You will collaborate with security and platform teams, use Terraform for IaC, and support Flux/ArgoCD, Grafana stack, and Azure