Senior Kubernetes Administrator
Location: Pennsylvania / Hybrid
Work Arrangement: Hybrid — currently 2 days onsite per week
Contract: Contract / Contract-to-Hire
Position Overview
We are seeking a Senior Kubernetes Administrator to design, administer, maintain and troubleshoot enterprise Kubernetes environments supporting business-critical applications across on-premises and cloud infrastructure.
This is a highly technical, hands-on infrastructure position for an administrator who understands Kubernetes beyond application deployment. The successful candidate will have experience operating production Kubernetes clusters, troubleshooting issues across the container, cluster, networking, storage and application layers, and automating repeatable infrastructure processes.
The administrator will work closely with Linux infrastructure engineers, application developers, DevOps personnel, database teams and other technology professionals to deploy, migrate and support containerized services across physical data centers and AWS environments.
The environment is evolving toward greater use of Linux, Kubernetes and PostgreSQL, with workloads spanning both AWS and on-premises infrastructure.
Primary Responsibilities
- Administer, configure, maintain and troubleshoot production Kubernetes clusters.
- Support Kubernetes infrastructure across on-premises and AWS/cloud environments.
- Manage Kubernetes cluster configuration, upgrades, patching, scaling and lifecycle activities.
- Create, modify and troubleshoot Kubernetes manifests including Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, Services, ConfigMaps, Secrets, Ingress and related resources.
- Develop, maintain and troubleshoot Helm charts used for enterprise application deployments.
- Administer and support Rancher or comparable Kubernetes management platforms.
- Diagnose complex Kubernetes problems involving pods, nodes, networking, DNS, ingress, storage, resource utilization and application dependencies.
- Support containerized application deployments and work with development teams to troubleshoot deployment and runtime issues.
- Configure and support persistent storage for Kubernetes workloads, including NFS, SAN/NAS and cloud-based storage.
- Support Kubernetes networking, including DNS, load balancing, ingress, routing, proxies, firewall requirements and service-to-service communication.
- Implement Kubernetes security and hardening practices including RBAC, secrets, certificates, service accounts, image/security policies and vulnerability remediation.
- Develop and maintain infrastructure automation using Ansible, Bash, Python and related tools.
- Support CI/CD processes used to build and deploy containerized applications.
- Participate in migration of workloads between AWS and on-premises Kubernetes/Linux environments.
- Implement monitoring, logging, alerting, backup and disaster-recovery processes for Kubernetes environments.
- Collaborate with Linux administrators on underlying RHEL/Linux operating systems, virtualization, networking and storage.
- Create and maintain technical documentation, operating procedures and deployment standards.
Required Technical Skills
Candidates should demonstrate strong, recent hands-on production experience with:
- Kubernetes cluster administration and troubleshooting
- Kubernetes architecture and core components
- Kubernetes manifests and YAML
- Helm chart creation, modification and troubleshooting
- Container technologies including Docker and/or Podman
- Enterprise Linux/RHEL environments
- Kubernetes networking, DNS, ingress and load balancing
- Persistent volumes and Kubernetes storage concepts
- TCP/IP networking and network troubleshooting
- Linux command-line administration and troubleshooting
- Bash and/or Python scripting
- Infrastructure automation and configuration management
- Security hardening, RBAC, certificates and secrets management
- Monitoring, logging and performance troubleshooting
- Git-based source control and CI/CD concepts
Highly Desired Skills
- Rancher Kubernetes management
- Ansible
- AWS EKS
- AWS infrastructure and workload migration
- GitLab / GitLab CI/CD
- PostgreSQL
- NFS and SMB
- SAN/NAS storage
- VMware or other enterprise virtualization platforms
- Prometheus and Grafana or comparable observability tools
- Java/Tomcat application troubleshooting
- Disaster recovery and backup/recovery administratio
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