EKS​/Kubernetes Engineer

We are seeking a highly skilled EKS/Kubernetes Engineer to configure, deploy, and operate mission‑critical Amazon EKS infrastructure supporting petabyte‑scale data processing workloads. This role requires deep expertise in Kubernetes internals, large‑scale cluster operations, and Apache Spark optimization to support thousands of concurrent jobs processing massive volumes of data.

This is a long‑term contract opportunity with a hybrid work schedule requiring candidates to work onsite three days per week in one of the following locations:
Jersey City, NJ;
New York City, NY;
Rockville, MD; or Northern Virginia
.

• Design, deploy, and maintain production‑grade Amazon EKS clusters optimized for petabyte‑scale data processing, ensuring high availability, resiliency, and fault tolerance.
• Manage and operate Kubernetes environments within secure, air‑gapped private VPCs, including administration of private container registries and package repositories.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex distributed systems issues across EKS, Karpenter, and Apache Spark, including scheduling bottlenecks, node provisioning delays, and large‑scale workload failures.
• Implement and optimize Karpenter consolidation and disruption policies to balance infrastructure efficiency, cost management, and workload stability.
• Develop and manage Spot and On‑Demand instance strategies, including robust interruption handling and workload recovery mechanisms.
• Define and enforce Resource Quotas, Limit Ranges, and Priority Classes to ensure efficient resource allocation and prevent resource contention.
• Configure and manage persistent storage solutions using Amazon EBS CSI Driver and Amazon EFS CSI Driver to support high‑performance data processing workloads.
• Optimize storage architecture for throughput, scalability, durability, and application resiliency.
• Design and implement proactive monitoring, logging, alerting, and anomaly detection solutions to identify and remediate system issues before they impact production operations.
• Architect fault‑tolerant solutions utilizing checkpointing, retry mechanisms, and graceful degradation strategies to minimize downtime and recomputation.
• Develop, maintain, and manage Kubernetes configurations and operational processes within highly secured, internet‑restricted environments.

• Extensive hands‑on experience designing, deploying, and supporting Kubernetes platforms in enterprise production environments.
• Deep expertise with Amazon EKS and cloud‑native technologies.
• Strong experience with Kubernetes cluster autoscaling solutions, including Karpenter
  .
• Proven experience supporting large‑scale Apache Spark workloads and distributed systems.
• Strong troubleshooting and performance tuning skills across Kubernetes, AWS infrastructure, networking, and storage.
• Experience working within highly secure, restricted‑access, or air‑gapped environments.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes resource management, scheduling, observability, and production operations.

• Kubernetes certifications such as CKA, CKAD, or CKS
  .
• AWS certifications.
• Experience contributing to open‑source Kubernetes, Karpenter, or Apache Spark projects.
• Knowledge of Fin Ops methodologies and cloud cost optimization at scale.
• Background supporting data engineering, analytics, or large‑scale data platform environments.