W Contract Azure Kubernetes Engineer

Job Title: Azure Kubernetes Engineer

Job Location: Houston, TX (Onsite from day one)

Job Duration: 6+ months

Minimum years of experience required: 8+ years

Type of Hire: w2 contract

JOB DETAILS:

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.