Kubernetes Platform Engineer – Voice Services Modernization

Role: Kubernetes Platform Engineer – Voice Services Modernization
Location: Philadelphia, PA (hybrid, 1-2 days/week onsite). Open to relocation.
Work authorization: Any valid work authorization, on W2.

Position Summary

We are seeking a Kubernetes Platform Engineer to design, deploy, automate, and operationalize cloud-native infrastructure for mission-critical voice applications. You will lead the transformation of traditional VM-based voice middleware and backend services into scalable, resilient Kubernetes platforms, using modern DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and observability practices.

The role spans infrastructure, application modernization, automation, and operational support. The goal is highly available, low-latency, carrier-grade voice services.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate production Kubernetes clusters (on-prem and/or public cloud) for real-time voice workloads.
• Migrate VM-based voice middleware and backend services to containerized, Kubernetes-native deployments.
• Containerize applications and create Helm charts and Kustomize overlays for repeatable deployments.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows for automated build, test, and release.
• Automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration with Terraform, Ansible, and scripting.
• Tune clusters and workloads for low latency, high availability, and resilience (pod scheduling, autoscaling, affinity, resource limits, failover).
• Configure Kubernetes networking for real-time traffic, including CNI plugins, ingress/load balancing, and service mesh where applicable.
• Implement observability: metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting.
• Support production operations: incident response, root cause analysis, capacity planning, patching, and upgrades.
• Apply security best practices, including RBAC, network policies, secrets management, image scanning, and compliance requirements.
• Collaborate with voice engineering, network, security, and operations teams, and produce runbooks and technical documentation.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years in platform engineering, DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering.
• 3+ years of hands-on production Kubernetes experience (OpenShift, EKS, AKS, GKE, or upstream).
• Experience containerizing and migrating legacy or VM-based applications to Kubernetes.
• Strong Docker/container runtime skills and Helm.
• Infrastructure-as-code experience with Terraform and/or Ansible.
• CI/CD experience with Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or similar. GitOps experience (Argo CD or Flux) is preferred.
• Observability tooling experience (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Splunk, or similar).
• Strong Linux administration, networking fundamentals (TCP/UDP, DNS, load balancing), and scripting (Bash, Python, or Go).
• Experience running highly available, latency-sensitive, or mission-critical production systems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in telecom or voice/VoIP platforms: SIP, RTP, SBCs, IMS, media servers, or voice middleware (Kamailio, FreeSWITCH, Asterisk, or similar).
• Experience with advanced Kubernetes networking for real-time workloads (Multus, SR-IOV, Calico, Cilium, host networking).
• Service mesh experience (Istio, Linkerd).
• Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKAD, CKS).
• Experience in large enterprise or carrier environments.
• Familiarity with distributed tracing (Jaeger, OpenTelemetry) and chaos/resilience testing.

Soft Skills

• Strong communication and the ability to work across infrastructure, development, and operations teams.
• Self-directed, with a bias for automation and documentation.
• Comfortable in a fast-paced modernization program with shifting priorities.