Kubernetes Platform Engineer, Task and Technical Lead

Oak Ridge National Laboratory•Oak Ridge, TN

53d•Hybrid

About The Position

The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL), which hosts several of the world's most powerful computer systems, is seeking highly qualified individuals to play a key role in improving the security, performance, and reliability of the NCCS computing infrastructure which supports multiple highly ranked Top500 Supercomputers, including the world's first exaflop system, Frontier. As a Task and Technical Lead for the Platform team, you will work within the Platforms group to support all activities of our supercomputer center. Our primary platform is the OLCF Slate Service, built on Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift, which provides a container orchestration service for running critical operation applications and user-managed persistent applications that run alongside our OLCF Supercomputer systems and other OLCF managed HPC clusters. As a Platform Engineer Task and Technical Lead, you will operate, implement, and maintain the infrastructure underpinning our on-premises Kubernetes clusters, with a strong focus on scalability, reliability, and maintainability. You will assist in leading the technical direction of our platform engineering initiatives, evaluate and integrate key technologies, provide daily task management for team members on large and medium sized projects, and mentor a team of engineers to deliver a robust internal platform that powers development across the organization. Deep involvement in operating, managing, and designing on-prem Kubernetes infrastructure, with full ownership from OS/hardware layer up to service-level automation. A platform-first approach to engineering that balances security, developer experience, and operational scalability. Strong mentorship and team enablement focus-guiding engineers while staying hands-on with operations, architecture, and implementation.

Requirements

BS degree in computer science or closely related field and a minimum of 8 years as a Platforms engineer.
At least 5 years of Kubernetes experience.
An equivalent combination of education and experience may be considered.
Excellent interpersonal/communication skills, and the ability to work as part of a team.
Strong working knowledge of Unix system fundamentals and common network protocols.
Experience managing Linux/UNIX operating systems in a heterogeneous environment.
Solid understanding of networked computing environment concepts.
Excellent understanding of networking, particularly Linux and Kubernetes networking
Experience with instrumenting bare metal and VMWare infrastructure
Ability to develop and maintain programs and scripts that aid in the operation and automation using various shell (primarily bash) and high-level languages (Python or Go).
Ability to proactively identify performance issues, problems, and areas for improvement.
Ability to identify requirements and to define, plan, and implement requisite solutions.
Ability to plan, organize, prioritize tasks, and complete assigned projects with minimal supervision.
Experience with continuous integration and continuous deployment software methodologies.
An understanding of code review and familiarity with tools like GitHub and GitLab.
Experience using tools such as Nagios, Grafana and Prometheus to monitor systems, metrics, and create dashboards.
Experience designing and implementing highly available systems/services utilizing virtual machines and Kubernetes resources.
Experience participating in an opensource community with patches accepted upstream.
Experience deploying and maintaining automated configuration management software such as Puppet or Ansible.
Experience implementing systems-level security technologies like SELinux and following security best practices.
This position requires the ability to obtain and maintain a clearance from the Department of Energy. As such, this position is a Workplace Substance Abuse program (WSAP) testing designed position which requires passing a pre-placement drug test and participation in an ongoing random drug testing program in which employees are subject to being randomly selected for testing. The occupant of this position will also be subject to an ongoing requirement to report to ORNL any drug-related arrest or conviction or receipt of a positive drug test result.

Responsibilities

Assist in managing operations for on-premises and cloud-based Kubernetes clusters.
Select, evaluate, and integrate critical components for networking, CI/CD tooling, OS management, service mesh, and Kubernetes operators-excluding observability, which is handled by a dedicated SRE sub-team.
Build test environments to evaluate tooling based on performance, feature set, and maintainability-especially for components that must work reliably with on-premise hardware and OS requirements.
Own upgrades, security hardening, monitoring integration, and scalability of all cluster infrastructure.
Write and maintain infrastructure and deployment code using tools such as ArgoCD (GitOps), Puppet (OS management), Go, Python, Bash, and GitLab CI.
Support the use and understanding of in-house Kubernetes operators and serve as a secondary maintainer for those controllers.
Collaborate on building a next-generation internal developer platform inspired by tools like Backstage or AWS Proton, focused on increasing development efficiency and security.
Work with the cybersecurity team to define secure image baselines and automate the patching pipeline for container images and golden base layers.
Engage with development teams to understand platform needs and tailor the cluster experience to meet evolving requirements.
Provide technical guidance, code reviews, and pair programming support to a team of 8-12 engineers.
Contribute to onboarding, team documentation, and process improvement initiatives.
Act as a go-to technical expert for all Kubernetes platform questions across the engineering organization.
Partner closely with internal cybersecurity and development teams to ensure the platform meets security, compliance, and usability expectations.
Participate in cross-functional projects related to platform enhancements and cluster lifecycle automation.
Be able to represent the Platforms team with vendors and both internal and external collaborators and partners.