Azure Kubernetes Engineer

Position: Azure Kubernetes Engineer

Location: Houston, TX***Onsite***

Duration: 1 Year

Job Description:

• The Azure Kubernetes Engineer L3 will provide advanced engineering and operational support for enterprise container platforms hosted on Microsoft Azure.
• The role is responsible for designing, deploying, securing, troubleshooting, and optimizing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) environments while serving as the escalation point for complex platform and application issues.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, upgrade, and administer highly available AKS clusters across development, test, and production environments.
• Provide L3 incident, problem, and root-cause support for Kubernetes, containers, networking, storage, security, and application deployment issues.
• Implement infrastructure automation using Terraform, ARM/Bicep, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, PowerShell, or Azure CLI.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and Helm-based deployment standards for containerized workloads.
• Configure cluster networking, ingress, load balancing, DNS, private endpoints, service mesh, persistent storage, and Azure identity integration.
• Establish monitoring, logging, alerting, capacity management, and observability using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, Prometheus, and Grafana.
• Implement platform security controls, including RBAC, Microsoft Entra ID integration, secrets management, image scanning, policy enforcement, and vulnerability remediation.
• Drive performance tuning, resiliency, backup, disaster recovery, patching, and cost optimization.
• Develop operational runbooks, architecture documents, support procedures, and knowledge articles.
• Collaborate with application, cloud, network, security, database, and service management teams; mentor L1/L2 engineers and lead technical escalations.

Required Skills

• Strong hands-on experience with Azure Kubernetes Service, Kubernetes administration, Docker, and container orchestration.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes architecture, pods, deployments, services, ingress, namespaces, RBAC, autoscaling, configuration, and troubleshooting.
• Strong Azure knowledge, including virtual networks, load balancers, private DNS, storage, Key Vault, managed identities, Azure Container Registry, Azure Policy, and Microsoft Entra ID.
• Hands-on experience with Terraform or Bicep and scripting using PowerShell, Bash, Python, or Azure CLI.
• Experience with Helm, Git, Azure DevOps or GitHub, and enterprise CI/CD practices.
• Experience with Linux administration, TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, firewalls, and cloud networking.
• Experience with monitoring and observability platforms such as Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Prometheus, and Grafana.
• Strong troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, documentation, and stakeholder communication skills.
• Experience working within ITIL-based incident, problem, change, and release management processes.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of infrastructure or cloud engineering experience, including at least 4 years of hands-on Kubernetes and Azure experience.
• Demonstrated experience supporting business-critical production environments in an enterprise setting.

Preferred Skills

• Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or Azure DevOps Engineer Expert.
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD), or Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS).
• Experience with GitOps tools such as Argo CD or Flux, service mesh technologies, and policy tools such as OPA/Gatekeeper.
• Experience with hybrid cloud, enterprise security standards, and regulated environments.

Work Requirements

• Primary work location: Houston, Texas.
• Ability to participate in an on-call rotation and support planned after-hours maintenance or critical incidents.
• Ability to work collaboratively with customer and global delivery teams across time zones.