Senior Platform Engineer: Kafka & Kubernetes Scale

CloudZero, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 190,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

CloudZero is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to own Kafka operations, Kubernetes environments, and cloud infrastructure. You’ll drive reliability, performance, and developer experience, with autonomy to shape our platform as we scale.

You’ll focus on optimizing Kafka and EKS, implement GitOps and CI/CD pipelines, and collaborate with engineering teams to build scalable, resilient systems. On-call readiness is required for incident response.

Qualifications

• Production Kafka experience with high-throughput systems.
• Experience running containerized workloads in production with Kubernetes environments (EKS/GKE/AKS or self-hosted).
• Familiarity with core cloud concepts; AWS and other clouds (GCP, Azure) acceptable.
• Strong IaC experience with Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar tools.
• Ability to write automation in Python, Go, Node, or Bash.
• Some experience with GitHub Actions and GitOps workflows.

Responsibilities

• Lead operations and reliability of Kafka platform, define SLOs for availability and latency.
• Administer and optimize Amazon EKS environments, cluster scaling and namespace provisioning.
• Implement monitoring, logging, and alerting for Kafka and Kubernetes with Sum o Logic.
• Collaborate with software teams to design reliable, scalable applications on Kubernetes and Kafka.
• Manage cloud environments using IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) integrated with GitHub Actions.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and deployments with GitHub Actions; ensure version control and automation.
• Provide on-call support and incident response.

Skills

Kafka ops

Kubernetes/EKS

Cloud platforms (AWS)

Terraform/ IaC

GitHub Actions

Python/Go/Node/Bash

GitOps practices

On-call experience

Tools

Amazon EKS

Terraform

CloudFormation

Pulumi

Sumo Logic

Job description

CloudZero is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to own Kafka operations, Kubernetes environments, and cloud infrastructure. You’ll drive reliability, performance, and developer experience, with autonomy to shape our platform as we scale.

You’ll focus on optimizing Kafka and EKS, implement GitOps and CI/CD pipelines, and collaborate with engineering teams to build scalable, resilient systems. On-call readiness is required for incident response.