Senior Platform Engineer: Kafka & Kubernetes at Scale

Devopsroles; Boston, Northern (MA, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

CloudZero is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to own Kafka operations and container orchestration across Kubernetes environments, primarily on AWS. You will drive reliability, performance, and developer experience, with a focus on GitOps, IaC, and scalable CI/CD pipelines.

You'll lead deployments and tuning of Kafka clusters and EKS, implement monitoring and alerting, and partner with software teams to build reliable, scalable applications. On-call responsibilities are included.

Qualifications

• Production Kafka experience in high-throughput environments.
• Strong Kubernetes experience across cloud providers (AWS/GKE/AKS or self-hosted).
• Experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to manage IaC.
• Ability to write automation in Python, Go, or Node and Bash.
• Experience with GitHub Actions or similar GitOps workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead the operations and reliability of our Kafka platform, including deployment, scaling, and topic governance, and define the SLOs for availability and latency.
• Administer and optimize our Amazon EKS environments, handling cluster scaling, node group management, namespace provisioning, and overall container resilience.
• Implement comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting for both Kafka and Kubernetes using Sumo Logic to catch bottlenecks before they impact the business.
• Partner closely with software engineering teams to design reliable, scalable applications that effectively leverage Kubernetes and Kafka.
• Manage our cloud environments using Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) integrated with GitHub Actions workflows.
• Build and maintain our CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure deployments using GitHub Actions, ensuring all configuration changes are version-controlled, automated, and predictable.
• On call experience

Skills

Kafka

Kubernetes

Cloud infra

IaC

Automation

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Pulumi

GitHub Actions

Job description

CloudZero is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to own Kafka operations and container orchestration across Kubernetes environments, primarily on AWS. You will drive reliability, performance, and developer experience, with a focus on GitOps, IaC, and scalable CI/CD pipelines.

You'll lead deployments and tuning of Kafka clusters and EKS, implement monitoring and alerting, and partner with software teams to build reliable, scalable applications. On-call responsibilities are included.