Senior Staff Engineer, Bare Metal Kubernetes Platform

Overview

Senior Staff Engineer on the Reliability Engineering team operating a bare-metal Kubernetes platform across multiple metro locations, covering OS provisioning through a multi-cluster fleet and a GitOps-deployed software-defined data plane.

What you'll do

• Own OS installation (Debian/Ubuntu) across bare-metal servers in multiple metros using PXE/iPXE imaging and cloud-init, and harden the OS prior to cluster bootstrap
• Build and maintain a repeatable, zero-touch provisioning pipeline so every metro is deployed consistently without manual per-node intervention
• Partner with the hardware teams on BIOS/firmware baselines, high-speed NIC configuration and disk layout standards, and diagnose faults at that layer
• Deploy and operate Kubernetes clusters across all metros with quorum-based control-plane fault tolerance and correct failure-domain placement
• Maintain the Layer 4 load balancer or keepalived VIP fronting all kube-apiserver instances
• Manage worker node provisioning, CNI configuration, and end-to-end cluster validation before workloads are onboarded
• Build and own the CI/CD pipeline that deploys the software-defined data plane, including automated throughput and latency validation gates before promotion to production
• Own data-plane observability: monitoring, alerting thresholds, and operational runbooks
• Operate on a multi-metro underlay and partner with network and security teams on VLANs, BGP peering, NIC bonding, private connectivity, firewall rules and segmentation
• Validate connectivity end to end and troubleshoot the network layer far enough to isolate a problem before handing it over
• Plan and execute rolling OS and Kubernetes upgrades across the fleet with zero unplanned downtime, maintaining tested upgrade runbooks
• Own the etcd snapshot schedule, retention policy, and offsite storage; verify restore runbooks before each site goes live
• Apply the platform's patching cadence, tracking CVEs affecting the OS, Kubernetes and cluster components
• Administer the centralized management plane across all clusters, including RBAC, cluster registration and policy enforcement, keeping production and non-production planes strictly isolated
• Drive GitOps-based fleet configuration management to keep clusters consistent, auditable, and drift-free
• Own your shift of a follow-the-sun on-call rotation and lead incident response for control-plane, data-plane, and network events
• Drive blameless postmortems and systematically eliminate recurring failure modes through automation, better runbooks, and sharper alerting
• Contribute to the shared incident-command process and maintain runbooks for the systems you operate

What you'll need

• Deep hands-on Linux/Ubuntu provisioning at scale, PXE/iPXE imaging, cloud-init, BIOS/firmware management, OS hardening
• Comfortable with BMC/IPMI, SMART data and platform sensors; able to diagnose disk, memory, NIC and power faults and work with vendors through warranty replacement
• Strong experience deploying and operating RKE2 or kubeadm clusters on bare metal, etcd operations, kube-apiserver HA, CNI (Multus/SR-IOV), multi-cluster fleet management
• Production experience managing multiple clusters through Rancher Prime, Rancher, or comparable fleet tooling
• GitOps or pipeline-driven infrastructure deployment, Ansible, Terraform, ArgoCD, or Fleet
• Hands-on with VLANs, BGP, bonded NICs, SR-IOV and private connectivity, with enough depth to troubleshoot across the boundary
• Demonstrated zero-downtime rolling upgrades of both OS and Kubernetes across a multi-node fleet
• Experience running platforms where availability is measured in minutes of downtime per year, and where an unreviewed change is the most likely cause of an outage
• Comfortable owning an on-call shift and leading infrastructure incident response
• Everything-as-code, repeatable and auditable; strong bias toward automation over manual operations

Nice to have

• Familiarity with 6WIND VSR or other DPDK-based data planes, enough to build and validate a deployment and performance-testing pipeline around one
• SR-IOV NIC tuning and data-plane performance validation
• SDN or private-connectivity platforms (Equinix Fabric, VyOS, or equivalent)
• Familiarity with LLM provider APIs and AI/agent gateway proxying patterns
• Experience operating infrastructure across geographically distributed sites

Details

• Location: Bangalore Office BLS2
• Position is new within the organization