Kubernetes Networking Platform Engineer

The biggest things they are looking for is a platform engineer who has extensive experience with Kubernetes and Networking.

This role is a Kubernetes Networking Platform Engineer with a heavy emphasis on platform engineering rather than traditional DevOps or application delivery. The team is looking for someone who has built, automated, and scaled Kubernetes networking platforms across an enterprise, with deep hands‑on experience in service mesh, ingress and gateway controllers, DNS, GitOps, and Infrastructure as Code. The majority of the work is focused on cross‑cluster and cross‑enterprise communication, traffic management, performance, reliability, and advanced network troubleshooting at scale. The ideal candidate brings a platform‑first and automation‑first mindset, actively leverages GenAI and AI tools to build and improve platforms, and can design tooling that helps application teams diagnose issues faster rather than assuming the platform is at fault. This is a highly visible role on a best‑in‑class platform team, includes a defined 24/7 on‑call rotation, and requires strong ownership, curiosity, and the ability to influence application teams across a large enterprise.

Job Title

Kubernetes Networking Platform Senior Engineer

Top Skills Details

· Undergraduate degree in an engineering or computer science discipline and/or equivalent experience/certification
· 6+ years of technology experience, including:
o 3+ years in a platform, infrastructure, or systems engineering role
o 3+ years working with public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform)
· Strong experience with Kubernetes, including:
o Networking fundamentals (CNI, service discovery, load balancing)
o Kubernetes networking primitives (Services, Ingress, NetworkPolicy)
· Hands-on experience with Kubernetes networking components, such as

Description

The Kubernetes Networking Platform Senior Engineer will lead the design, delivery, and operation of networking capabilities across the enterprise Kubernetes platform. This includes critical components such as ingress controllers, service mesh, DNS, and traffic management.

This engineer will join a team responsible for building a secure, scalable, and observable networking layer that enables application teams to seamlessly connect, communicate, and expose services within and outside the cluster. The ideal candidate brings deep experience in distributed systems and networking, and is passionate about building platform abstractions that simplify complexity for developers while maintaining enterprise-grade reliability and security.

We are transforming the way technology is managed at Marriott. Automation, DevOps, and product-oriented platform engineering are the new standards as we enable rapid innovation, speed-to-market, and resilient operations. As we are early in this journey, strong technical leadership and the ability to influence and elevate others is critical.

We are transforming the way technology is managed at Marriott. Automation, DevOps, and long-term product iteration will be the new standards as we seek to enable rapid innovation, speed-to-market, and proactive security and operations. With leaders who have driven this transformation elsewhere, we need engineers who are excited about evolving the organization and setting the gold standard. We are early in this journey and thought leadership, with the ability to bring others along, is key.

Job Description
• Everything as code mindset:
o Public Cloud technology stacks such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform or Alibaba.
o Kubernetes solution design, deployment, management and orchestration across multi-cloud environment
o Experience driving highly technical architecture, and driving outcomes with automation through Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and Helm
o Experience building and operating CI/CD – build, deploy, release automation through pipelines
• Ability to design end to end architecture that supports 99.99% service availability with performance and cost considerations
• Delivery focused with experience in Kanban

Preferred:
• Ability to design end-to-end architecture that supports 99.99% service availability with performance and cost considerations
• Familiarity with cloud native database technologies (Amazon RDS, Aurora, Keyspaces, DocumentDB, Redis/Elasticache, Azure CosmosDB)
• Familiarity distributed systems such as Kafka, Couchbase, Cassandra, etc.
• Familiarity with Go, Rust and/or Python
• Excellent technical knowledge of current & emerging infrastructure systems & standards
• Strong knowledge of the best available tools, software, applications, and systems for attaining best-in-class technology platforms across the enterprise.
• Ability to create constructive relationships, influence, and communicate (to product team, engineering management, and non-technical staff).

CORE WORK ACTIVITIES
• Deploy, automate, maintain, and manage cloud infrastructure to ensure security, performance, and availability of production systems
• Maintains cloud and automation operational metrics
• Code solutions to continuously improve products and solutions to be scalable and highly available
• Automate everything, from right sizing (VM, Disks, Storage Tiers), self-service and real-time spend visibility
• Review issues logs and metrics to identify trends and solutions that should be implemented
• Maintain in-depth documentation of activities and system configuration.
• Perform troubleshooting, resolution, and problem analysis.
• Participate in architectural discussions to help Application Teams make the most efficient choices.
• Participates in defining the \"big picture\" of challenges impacting the customer experience, including the technical, functional, and process considerations, and creatively defines the D&O strategy to address those challenges.
• Maintain industry knowledge and enhance subject matter expertise, identify trends and changes in technology and automation strategies.

Preferred:
· Experience with one or more high-level programming languages (Go, Python, Java, or similar)
· Deep understanding of:
o Layer 4 / Layer 7 networking concepts
o Traffic routing, load balancing strategies, and API gateway patterns
o mTLS, zero-trust networking, and secure service-to-service communication
· Experience operating service mesh at scale (traffic shaping, retries, circuit breaking, observability)
· Familiarity with cloud-native networking integrations:
o AWS (ALB/NLB, VPC Lattice, Route53, PrivateLink)
o Hybrid or multi-cluster networking patterns
· Experience with observability tooling (metrics, logs, tracing) for network and service performance
· Ability to influence platform adoption and drive best practices across application teams
· Experience supporting or implementing self-healing, resilient infrastructure patterns

CORE WORK ACTIVITIES

Kubernetes & Platform Engineering
· Design, build, and operate Kubernetes networking capabilities including ingress, service mesh, and DNS
· Develop and maintain standardized, self-service networking patterns for application teams
· Implement and manage traffic routing strategies, including canary deployments, blue/green releases, and failover mechanisms
· Ensure secure communication through network policies, mTLS, and zero-trust principles
· Continuously improve platform reliability, scalability, and performance through automation and observability
· Troubleshoot complex networking issues across distributed systems and drive root cause analysis
· Partner with security, platform, and application teams to define and enforce networking standards
· Build tooling and automation to improve developer experience and reduce operational overhead
· Maintain clear and consumable documentation for platform users
· Stay current with emerging trends in Kubernetes and cloud-native networking

Platform Operations, Reliability & Security
• Serve in on call rotation
• Support monitoring, logging, and observability integrations (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry)
• Implement and maintain platform level security controls, including OPA/Gatekeeper, secrets management (e.g., Vault), and IAM guardrails
• Participate in disaster recovery, backup/restore operations, and upgrade cycles
• Review issues, logs, and metrics to identify trends and propose improvements
• Maintain clear and complete documentation for system configurations and operational procedures

Collaboration & Leadership
• Participate in architectural discussions to help application teams make efficient platform decisions
• Provide mentorship to junior engineers and contribute to peer reviews
• Support interviewing and help foster a modern engineering culture
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including software engineering, cloud operations, and security

Managing Priorities and Delivery
• Contribute to planning, prioritization, and organization of engineering work to meet delivery timelines
• Provide technical leadership for successful platform feature delivery
• Assist with evaluating vendor solutions and tooling, providing recommendations to leadership
• Communicate technical concepts clearly to stakeholders, both technical and non-technical
• Understand business priorities and contribute to delivering against performance and budget goals
• Perform other reasonable duties as assigned