Senior Kubernetes Engineer

Peraton•,

19h•$104,000 - $166,000•Remote

About The Position

Peraton is seeking an experienced Senior Kubernetes Engineer to support the development, modernization, and migration of containerized and agentic workloads in a government multi-cloud environment serving more than 70 customer tenants. The engineer will bring extensive engineering experience and deep Kubernetes and Azure expertise, designing and leading implementation of container-platform requirements and architecture on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and standing up and operating Agentic Runtime for Kubernetes (ARK) to host AI-agent workloads. This position is a technical escalation point for complex incidents, leads root cause analysis, and provides mentorship and knowledge sharing across engineering teams. The role is remote and requires working online from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM Eastern.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree and 8 years of experience, master's degree and 6 years, associate degree and 10 years, or high school diploma/equivalent and 12 years.
Must be a U.S. citizen and able to obtain and maintain a DHS Public Trust clearance.
Engineering and systems analysis experience, with deep hands-on focus on Kubernetes in production.
Extensive hands-on experience operating AKS and the broader Kubernetes stack, including control plane, CNI networking, ingress, CSI storage, RBAC, Helm, and workload scheduling.
Hands-on experience deploying and operating ARK or comparable Kubernetes-native agent or operator platforms using the CRD-plus-controller pattern, including ARK Custom Resources (Agents, Models, Teams, Tools, and Queries) and MCP/A2A integration.
Proven experience leading incident management and root cause analysis in large-scale, multi-tenant government environments.
Deep knowledge of FedRAMP compliance and Kubernetes and Azure security best practices.
Strong leadership, communication, and technical documentation skills, including the ability to communicate effectively with technical teams and senior stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD), plus Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) or Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305).
Proficiency with GitOps and Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, Bicep, Helm, and Argo CD or Flux, and CI/CD pipelines such as Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.
Advanced automation and remediation scripting with Python, PowerShell, or Go, including use of the ARK Python SDK (ark-sdk).
Experience integrating LLM providers, including Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or local models, behind an agentic runtime.

Responsibilities

Serve as the Tier 3 escalation point for complex incidents and outages across AKS and the ARK agentic-runtime environment.
Investigate and resolve issues across the Kubernetes stack, including AKS clusters, control plane, CNI networking, ingress, CSI storage, workload scheduling, and ARK control plane and Custom Resources.
Lead root cause analysis for high-severity incidents and implement solutions to prevent recurrence.
Manage high-priority incident communications with stakeholders, leadership, and affected tenants.
Define and enforce observability standards across tenant clusters using Azure Monitor, Managed Prometheus, Container Insights, Azure Log Analytics, and OpenTelemetry, including ARK agent-level telemetry.
Identify and mitigate cluster, node-pool, and workload risks proactively.
Analyze performance, cost, and capacity trends and architect optimizations to improve stability, efficiency, and security at scale.
Lead management and maintenance of AKS clusters and ARK across a 70-plus-tenant environment.
Deploy, upgrade, and operate ARK on Kubernetes, managing CRDs, controllers, and model and tool integrations, including MCP servers, to host AI agents declaratively and provider-agnostically.
Ensure tenant resources are secure, FedRAMP compliant, and continuously optimized by enforcing Kubernetes RBAC, network policy, and Azure workload identity.
Partner with the Architecture team on solutions aligned with the Azure Well-Architected Framework and Kubernetes best practices.
Own and enforce team Change Management procedures.
Lead incident intake, triage prioritization, and team workload management as the technical lead.
Mentor and train Tier 2 engineers on Kubernetes and agentic-runtime operations and lead knowledge-transfer sessions.
Improve team metrics and service delivery in coordination with the Service Delivery Manager and Product Owner.
Maintain documentation of incident response procedures, architecture decisions, and lessons learned.