Lead Kubernetes Engineer

Morgan Stanley • Edison, NJ

17h

About The Position

Since 1935, Morgan Stanley is known as a global leader in financial services, always evolving and innovating to better serve our clients and our communities in more than 40 countries around the world. Department Profile Our Technology team is at the forefront of driving technological innovations, increasing operational efficiency, and delivering high-impact projects. We partner closely with our business units to deliver sustainable technology solutions that enable business goals and create lasting value for Morgan Stanley and our clients. Position Overview This position is part of the strategic initiative to centralize and streamline the onboarding and integration of applications within the Private Cloud environment, with a special focus on the deployment of both internally developed and vendor applications through Kubernetes. The dedicated resource will play a pivotal role in ensuring that all distributed applications-whether proprietary or third-party-are onboarded efficiently, securely, and in accordance with architectural and operational standards. What You will do in the role You will be responsible for coordinating with application development and vendor teams as a subject matter expert (SME) to translate business requirements documents (BRD) and software requirement specifications (SRS) into robust, cloud-native infrastructure and architectural patterns. This entails a holistic understanding of both functional and non-functional requirements, including scalability, security, reliability, and performance.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience working in a similar capacity
• Mastery of Kubernetes constructs, such as namespaces, RBAC, network policies, persistent storage, and service mesh architectures (e.g., Istio, Linkerd).
• Proficient in Helm, Kustomize, and other Kubernetes manifest management tools.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, ideally with platforms like Jenkins, GitLab, or Azure DevOps, specifically tailored for containerized applications.
• Strong scripting skills in Bash, Python, or PowerShell for automation and operational efficiency.
• Hands-on experience with monitoring solutions including Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, and cloud-native APM tools.
• Familiarity with cloud security best practices and integration of secure vaults (e.g., HashiCorp Vault, Azure Key Vault) for secrets management.
• Understanding of load balancing solutions both inside and outside Kubernetes (e.g., Ingress controllers, external LBs).
• Knowledge of networking, firewalls, and secure communication patterns in hybrid cloud architectures.
• Experience with batch processing and integration of Windows/Linux services in Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Application Onboarding : Lead the end-to-end onboarding process for both Wealth Management private cloud applications and vendor solutions into the Kubernetes platform, ensuring alignment with organizational standards and compliance mandates.
• Integration Design : Create comprehensive Kubernetes integration designs, encompassing containerization strategies, network policies, service mesh integration, persistent storage configuration, and cloud resource mapping.
• Configuration and Deployment : Oversee the configuration and deployment of Kubernetes resources, including pods, deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, ConfigMaps, Secrets, Ingress controllers, and custom resource definitions (CRDs). Ensure applications are securely and efficiently released to the private cloud environment.
• Infrastructure Sizing and Optimization: Collaborate with the infrastructure team to finalize resource sizing, autoscaling parameters, and quota management for each application, leveraging tools such as Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, Vertical Pod Autoscaler, and resource requests/limits.
• Artifact Creation: Develop and maintain Helm charts, Kubernetes manifests, CI/CD pipeline templates, and automated deployment scripts. These artifacts will accelerate onboarding and simplify ongoing maintenance and updates across vendor and proprietary applications.
• Tool Enablement: Design and implement tools that facilitate deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, and lifecycle management for applications within Kubernetes. Integrate with SWAT, performance engineering, and support teams to ensure seamless operation and rapid incident resolution.
• Non-Functional Change Support: Take ownership of non-functional changes including hardware provisioning, network segmentation (firewalls), ALM onboarding, load balancer configuration, secure vault integration, batch processing setup, and Windows/Linux service configurations as applicable.
• Vendor Application Integration: Partner with third-party vendors to containerize and onboard their applications into the private cloud, addressing unique integration challenges and ensuring compliance with internal enterprise policies.
• Level 3 Troubleshooting: Provide advanced troubleshooting expertise during incidents, acting as the escalation point for Kubernetes platform issues, application outages, and performance bottlenecks. Collaborate closely with monitoring and operations teams to restore service and implement long-term fixes.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed