Principal Platform Engineer - Kubernetes Reliability and Distributed Systems

This role has been designed as 'Hybrid' with a requirement that you will work on average 2 days per week from an HPE office.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud company advancing the way people live and work. We help companies connect, protect, analyze, and act on their data and applications wherever they live, from edge to cloud, so they can turn insights into outcomes at the speed required to thrive in today’s complex world. Our culture thrives on finding new and better ways to accelerate what’s next.

We know varied backgrounds are valued and succeed here. We have the flexibility to manage our work and personal needs. We make bold moves, together, and are a force for good. If you are looking to stretch and grow your career our culture will embrace you. Open up opportunities with HPE.

We are seeking a Principal Platform Engineer with deep expertise in Kubernetes, distributed systems, and highly available infrastructure to help evolve and operate the Object Storage platform.

This role will own the most complex platform-level technical challenges, including Kubernetes scheduling and resource management, pod failover, service discovery and load balancing, control‑plane availability, node failure recovery, timeout behavior, and system resilience during degraded operating conditions.

The successful candidate will work across engineering teams to establish clear ownership, diagnose complex production issues, guide architectural decisions, and build scalable, reliable platform capabilities. This is a hands‑on technical leadership role that requires both deep implementation experience and the ability to influence engineering practices across the organization.

• Serve as the senior technical authority for Kubernetes platform architecture, reliability, and operational behavior.
• Own the investigation and resolution of complex issues involving:
  • Pod failover and rescheduling
  • Service availability and load balancing
  • Control Plane operation as well as Node failover
  • Network, API, and service timeouts
  • Resource requests, limits, quotas, scheduling, affinity, taints, tole rations, and workload pinning
  • Cluster capacity, performance, and scaling
  • Distributed‑system failure modes and recovery behavior
• Define and drive improvements to Kubernetes high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster‑recovery strategies.
• Establish clear technical ownership and operating models for platform capabilities.
• Lead architecture, design, and implementation of platform improvements across multiple engineering teams.
• Develop repeatable approaches for diagnosing failures across application, Kubernetes, networking, storage, and infrastructure layers.
• Improve observability, including metrics, logs, traces, alerts, dashboards, and health indicators for platform services.
• Define and monitor service‑level objectives and reliability measures for platform components.
• Lead or support major incident response, root‑cause analysis, and corrective‑action programs.
• Identify systemic issues rather than treating incidents as isolated events.
• Create technical standards, reference architectures, runbooks, and operational best practices.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the organization’s expertise in Kubernetes and distributed systems.
• Partner with application, infrastructure, networking, security, and operations teams to resolve cross‑functional issues.
• Evaluate new Kubernetes capabilities and platform technologies and determine where they provide meaningful value.
• Balance short‑term incident resolution with long‑term architectural improvements.

• Significant experience designing, building, and…