Lead Kubernetes Platform Engineer (DevSecOps)

About the role

An experienced, hands-on Kubernetes Platform Engineer / DevSecOps Lead is sought for Abu Dhabi, UAE, with candidates also open to working from India and relocating. The role centres on operating, maintaining, troubleshooting, securing and optimising production Kubernetes environments rather than building new deployments or developing CI/CD pipelines. Practical experience in Kubernetes Day 2 operations is the most critical requirement.

Key responsibilities

• Administer and troubleshoot production Kubernetes clusters, including control-plane components, worker nodes, pods, networking, DNS, ingress, storage and scheduling, and handle upgrades, incidents, root-cause analysis, backups and performance tuning.
• Install, configure and upgrade RKE2 clusters and Rancher Manager, and manage cluster lifecycle, RBAC, high availability, monitoring and backups.
• Deploy and manage Harvester infrastructure, VMs, networking and Longhorn storage, and integrate it with Rancher/RKE2.
• Implement container scanning, vulnerability management, SBOM generation, image signing, secure registries, secrets management, CIS hardening and policy-as-code (e.g. Trivy, Cosign, Kyverno).
• Manage Linux servers, patching, hardening and automation with Bash, Python or Ansible.
• Maintain observability with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki and ELK/EFK, and set up alerting and incident investigation.
• Build secure CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps), use GitOps with ArgoCD or Rancher Fleet, and deploy with Helm, Terraform and Ansible.

Required profile

• Proven hands-on experience in production Kubernetes administration and Day 2 operations.
• Strong troubleshooting, incident response, root-cause analysis and cluster recovery experience.
• Practical exposure to RKE2, Rancher and Harvester.
• Ability to resolve complex production issues independently and work with cross-functional teams.
• Relocation willingness required for India-based candidates.

Required skills

• Kubernetes, RKE2, Rancher Manager and Harvester HCI
• Software supply chain security (vulnerability scanning, SBOM, image signing)
• Linux administration and scripting
• Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, ELK/EFK
• Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Terraform, Helm, Ansible
• Preferred: CKA/CKS, NVIDIA GPU operator, Istio, AWS EKS/Azure AKS, high-availability enterprise platforms