Service Mesh Engineer (Istio / Linkerd)

Bright Vision Technologies•Naperville, IL

1d•Remote

About The Position

Bright Vision Technologies is seeking a skilled Service Mesh Engineer (Istio / Linkerd) to join their dynamic team. This role involves designing, deploying, and operating service mesh platforms to ensure secure, observable, and reliable service-to-service communication across their Kubernetes estate. The focus is on platform engineering, mesh adoption, mTLS, traffic policy, and enabling application teams to benefit from the mesh without added complexity. The ideal candidate will have production experience with service mesh, a deep understanding of Envoy and the data plane, and possess both platform engineering discipline and pragmatic adoption strategies.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
Five or more years of experience in platform engineering, SRE, or networking roles.
Hands-on experience operating Istio or Linkerd in production.
Strong understanding of Envoy proxy internals and configuration.
Deep Kubernetes expertise including networking, CNI, and ingress.
Strong understanding of mTLS, PKI, and certificate lifecycle management.
Experience with distributed tracing and observability for mesh traffic.
Proficiency in Go or Python for tooling and automation.
Strong troubleshooting skills across networking, application, and control plane layers.
Excellent communication and collaboration skills.

Nice To Haves

Experience with multi-cluster Istio or Linkerd deployments.
Familiarity with Cilium service mesh and eBPF networking.
Open-source contributions to service mesh projects.
Experience with SPIFFE/SPIRE for workload identity.
Exposure to zero-trust networking initiatives at enterprise scale.

Responsibilities

Design and operate service mesh platforms — primarily Istio and Linkerd — across multi-cluster Kubernetes environments.
Implement and operate mTLS, certificate rotation, and identity propagation across the mesh.
Define traffic management policies including routing, retries, circuit breaking, and fault injection.
Integrate the mesh with ingress, egress, and API gateway tiers for unified traffic management.
Build observability for mesh traffic including distributed tracing, golden signals, and topology visualization.
Design multi-cluster and cross-cluster mesh topologies for high availability and tenant isolation.
Profile and optimize mesh performance, sidecar resource usage, and control-plane footprint, applying systematic measurement, targeted improvements, and data-driven validation to deliver quantifiable gains in throughput, latency, or resource efficiency.
Develop paved-road adoption patterns and onboarding guides that make mesh adoption easy for app teams.
Implement authorization policies and zero-trust patterns at the service mesh layer.
Operate service mesh upgrades, control-plane lifecycle management, and configuration governance, applying disciplined release practices that keep the mesh current without disrupting workloads running on top of it.
Partner with SRE, platform, and security teams on mesh policy and incident response.
Troubleshoot complex networking, mTLS, and traffic issues spanning sidecar and gateway tiers.
Maintain runbooks, architecture diagrams, and onboarding materials for the service mesh platform.
Stay current with Istio, Linkerd, Cilium, and broader service mesh ecosystem developments.