Senior DevOps Engineer – PostgreSQL & Kafka on Kubernetes

Mirantis, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Professional development

Conference attendance

Hackathons

Tech talks

Company outings

Job summary

Mirantis is seeking a Senior Data Platform Engineer to run PostgreSQL and Kafka platforms behind k0rdent-ai, our multi-tenant control plane for enterprise GPU infrastructure. You will deploy and operate stateful databases and streaming services on Kubernetes across cloud and bare metal, with a strong focus on automation, observability, and security.

You will own upgrades, backups, DR planning, and incident reviews, while enabling product teams with self-service access through code.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering.

Responsibilities

• Run PostgreSQL and Kafka on Kubernetes across cloud and bare-metal clusters.
• Manage GitOps with Argo CD/Flux, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Design and operate high availability and disaster recovery per region and cross-region.
• Provide self-service provisioning for databases, users, and topics via code.
• Build monitoring and alerting for replication lag, backups, and capacity.
• Implement TLS/mTLS, secrets management, and per-tenant isolation.
• Operate data movement pipelines and CDC with Debezium and Kafka Connect.
• Write Go or Python utilities to automate manual tasks.

Skills

Kubernetes operations

SRE practices

Go or Python scripting

CI/CD

Incident response

High availability design

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

CloudNativePG

Strimzi

Argo CD

Terraform

Kubernetes operators

Job description

• Full-time

Company Description

Mirantis, an IREN company, is the Kubernetes-native AI infrastructure company, enabling organizations to build and operate scalable, secure, and sovereign infrastructure for modern AI, machine learning, and data-intensive applications. By combining open source innovation with deep expertise in Kubernetes orchestration, Mirantis empowers platform engineering teams to deliver composable, production-ready developer platforms across any environment—on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, or in sovereign data centers. As enterprises navigate the growing complexity of AI-driven workloads, Mirantis delivers the automation, GPU orchestration, and policy-driven control needed to manage infrastructure with confidence and agility. Committed to open standards and freedom from lock-in, Mirantis ensures that customers retain full control of their infrastructure strategy. https://www.mirantis.com/

Job Description

We are looking for a Senior Data Platform Engineer to run the PostgreSQL and Apache Kafka platform behind k0rdent-ai — our multi-tenant control plane for enterprise GPU infrastructure. Every cluster provisioned, every GPU-hour consumed, and every tenant action is recorded on this platform, so it must be reliable, secure, and recoverable. This is a hands-on DevOps / SRE role for stateful systems. You will deploy and operate PostgreSQL (CloudNativePG) and Kafka (Strimzi) on Kubernetes using operators, Helm, and GitOps — across cloud and bare-metal clusters, in a global control plane and multiple regions. You will own automation, upgrades, observability, backups, and disaster recovery, and give product teams self-service access to databases and topics through code. Main Responsibilities

• Run PostgreSQL and Kafka on Kubernetes: Deploy, upgrade, scale, and operate CloudNativePG and Strimzi clusters with Helm charts and operator custom resources, across cloud and bare-metal Kubernetes.
• GitOps & Infrastructure as Code: Manage everything declaratively with Argo CD (or Flux), Helm, and Terraform; build CI/CD pipelines for database and Kafka changes, schema migrations, and operator upgrades.
• High Availability & Disaster Recovery: Design and operate high availability within each region and cross-region disaster recovery — PostgreSQL replica clusters, backups and point-in-time recovery, Kafka MirrorMaker 2 — with defined RPO/RTO targets and regular failover drills.
• Self-Service Platform: Give product teams self-service provisioning of databases, users, topics, and ACLs through code, with secure defaults and guardrails.
• Observability & Operations: Build monitoring and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) for replication lag, backups, consumer lag, and capacity; participate in on-call and lead incident reviews.
• Security & Multi-Tenancy: Implement TLS/mTLS, secrets management (Vault/OpenBao), network policies, Kafka ACLs, and per-tenant isolation; integrate database and Kafka access with our identity platform (Keycloak / OIDC).
• Data Movement & CDC: Operate the outbox and change-data-capture pipelines (Debezium, Kafka Connect) that keep databases and event streams consistent between the global control plane and regions.
• Automation & Tooling: Write automation and small services in Go or Python to remove manual work, and partner with application teams on schema standards and performance troubleshooting.

Qualifications

Must Have

• Experience: 8+ years in DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering, including 3+ years running stateful systems (databases or message streaming) in production.
• Kubernetes: Strong hands-on Kubernetes operations — StatefulSets, persistent volumes and storage classes, pod disruption budgets, scheduling and affinity, network policies, and cluster upgrades — on cloud and/or bare-metal clusters.
• Operators & Helm: Production experience running PostgreSQL and/or Kafka through Kubernetes operators (CloudNativePG, Zalando, or Crunchy PGO; Strimzi, Confluent for Kubernetes, or similar), and authoring and maintaining Helm charts. Depth with one operator matters more than the specific product.
• GitOps & IaC: Day-to-day use of Argo CD or Flux, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar) in a declarative, review-driven workflow.
• PostgreSQL Operations: Practical PostgreSQL administration — replication and failover, backup and point-in-time recovery, connection pooling (PgBouncer), version upgrades, and performance troubleshooting.
• Kafka Operations: Running Kafka in production — brokers, topics and partitions, replication, consumer groups, monitoring, and capacity planning.
• Reliability & DR: Designing and testing high availability and disaster recovery for stateful systems, with defined RPO/RTO.
• Automation: Strong scripting and programming in Go (preferred) or Python, plus Bash.

Nice to Have

• Cross-region replication (CloudNativePG replica clusters, Kafka MirrorMaker 2) and global/regional multi-site architectures.
• Debezium, Kafka Connect, and transactional outbox / CDC patterns.
• Identity integration for data platforms (Keycloak, OIDC, LDAP/Active Directory).
• Observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, VictoriaMetrics).
• Secrets and security tooling (Vault/OpenBao, cert-manager, mTLS).
• Bare-metal infrastructure, Ceph or object storage, or GPU/AI infrastructure.
• Contributions to CloudNativePG, Strimzi, or related open-source projects.
• Experience in SOC 2 or ISO 27001 environments.

Education and ExperienceBachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Additional Information

What does Mirantis offer you?

• Work with an established Silicon Valley leader in the cloud infrastructure industry;
• Work with exceptionally passionate, talented and engaging colleagues, helping Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customers implement next-generation cloud technologies;
• Be a part of cutting-edge, open-source innovation;
• Thrive in the high-energy environment of a young company where openness, collaboration, risk-taking, and continuous growth are valued;
• Professional development and training;
• Attend conferences and working groups;
• Company outings, happy hours, hackathons, and tech talks;
• Receive a competitive compensation package with a strong benefits plan.