Kubernetes Platform Engineer

Requisition Id15517

Overview

The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL), which hosts several of the world's most powerful computer systems, is seeking highly qualified individuals to play a key role in improving the security, performance, and reliability of theNCCS computing infrastructure which supports multiple highly ranked Top
500 Supercomputers, including the world's first exaflop system, Frontier.

The Team

As a Kubernetes Engineer for the Platform team, you will work within the Platforms group to support all activities of our supercomputer center. Our primary platform is the OLCF Slate Service, built on Kubernetes and Red Hat Open Shift, which provides a container orchestration service for running critical operation applications and user-managed persistent applications that run alongside our OLCF Supercomputer systems and other OLCF managed HPC clusters.

The Role

As a Platform Engineer, you will operate, implement, and maintain the infrastructure underpinning our on-premises Kubernetes clusters, with a strong focus on scalability, reliability, and maintainability. You will assist with our platform engineering initiatives, evaluate and integrate key technologies, be an individual contributor for large and medium sized projects, and assist a team of engineers in delivering a robust internal platform that powers development across the organization.

This role requires:
Kubernetes experience, Kubernetes cluster admin experience, Linux Sysadmin experience, knowledge of data center hardware, and significant experience scripting and automation.

Major Duties/Responsibilities Platform Operations & Implementation

• Assist in day-to-day operations for on-premises and cloud-based Kubernetes clusters.
• Develop and integrate critical components for networking, CI/CD tooling, OS management, service mesh, and Kubernetes operators-excluding observability, which is handled by a dedicated SRE sub-team.
• Build test environments to evaluate tooling based on performance, feature set, and maintainability-especially for components that must work reliably with on-premise hardware and OS requirements.
• Work on upgrades, security hardening, monitoring integration, and scalability of all cluster infrastructure.
• Participant in an on-call rotation.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & Tooling

• Write and maintain infrastructure and deployment code using tools such as ArgoCD (Git Ops), Puppet (OS management), Go, Python, Bash, and Git Lab CI.
• Support the use and understanding of in-house Kubernetes operators and serve as a secondary maintainer for those controllers.

Hardware and Infrastructure Management

• Write and maintain automation for infrastructure provisioning and Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management - most of our K8s clusters run on bare metal.
• Write and maintain automation for configuration of host OS and Kubernetes tooling.
• Understand the principles of enterprise data centers and hardware management.

Collaboration

• Partner closely with internal cybersecurity and development teams to ensure the platform meets security, compliance, and usability expectations.
• Participate in cross-functional projects related to platform enhancements and cluster lifecycle automation.
• Be able to represent the Platforms team with vendors and both internal collaborators and partners.

Basic Qualifications

• BSdegree in a scientific field and 5+ years of relevant experience or equivalent experience.
• At least three years of experience with Kubernetes cluster administration.
• At least three years of experience with Linux system administration.
• Knowledge of data center hardware and infrastructure management (IPMI, Open Manage, etc).
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tooling such as Terraform, Helm, and Puppet.
• Experience with CI/CD tooling and Git Ops.
• Experience with code review and familiarity with tools like git, Git Hub and Git Lab.

Preferred Qualifications

• Excellent interpersonal/communications skills, and the ability to work as part of a team.
• Experience with managing image registries such as Quay or Harbor.
• Solid understanding of networked computing environment concepts.
• Strong working knowledge of Unix systems fundamentals and common network protocols.
• Ability to develop and maintain programs and scripts that aid in the operation and automation of tasks using various shell and scripting languages (primarily bash, Python, and Go).
• Ability to identify requirements and to define, plan, and implement requisite solutions.
• Experience using tools such as Prometheus, Nagios, and Grafana to monitor systems, metrics and create dashboards.
• Experience designing and implementing highly available systems/services.
• Experience with Site Reliability Engineering for Kubernetes infrastructure and application deployments.

Security, Credentialing, and Eligibility Requirements

• This position requires the ability to obtain and maintain an HSPD-12 PIV badge.
• For employment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), a Real  form of identification will be required.
• Additionally,…