Working Style: Hybrid – 3 days per week in the London office
The Opportunity
We are looking for a Platform Engineer with strong hands-on experience building and operating self-managed Kubernetes environments .
This is a hands-on infrastructure role focused on designing, deploying, scaling and maintaining Kubernetes-based platforms across private, on-premises and cloud environments.
We are specifically looking for someone who has personally provisioned, administered and operated Kubernetes clusters , rather than someone whose Kubernetes experience is limited to deploying applications onto managed services such as EKS, AKS or GKE.
What You'll Be Doing
- Design, build and operate self-managed Kubernetes clusters across private/on-premises and cloud environments.
- Manage the full Kubernetes cluster lifecycle, including provisioning, upgrades, scaling, maintenance and troubleshooting.
- Manage cluster infrastructure including control planes, worker nodes, networking, ingress and storage .
- Develop and maintain infrastructure-as-code using Terraform and/or Ansible .
- Build and improve CI/CD and GitOps workflows using GitHub Actions, ArgoCD and Helm .
- Develop internal platform services and automation using Python .
- Monitor and troubleshoot production Kubernetes environments.
- Improve platform reliability, performance, scalability and observability.
- Implement backup, disaster recovery and failover strategies.
- Apply security best practices across Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure.
- Support demanding compute, data and machine-learning workloads.
- Contribute to platform architecture and technical strategy.
Hands-on experience with self-managed Kubernetes is essential.
We are particularly interested in candidates with experience using one or more of:
- kubeadm
- Rancher / RKE / RKE2
- OpenShift
- K3s / MicroK8s
- Other self-managed Kubernetes distributions or cluster deployment frameworks
Your experience should include several of the following:
- Building/provisioning Kubernetes clusters from scratch
- Control-plane administration
- Worker-node management
- Kubernetes upgrades and cluster lifecycle management
- etcd
- CNI/networking such as Calico, Cilium or Flannel
- Ingress/load balancing such as NGINX or HAProxy
- Kubernetes networking and NetworkPolicies
- Persistent storage / CSI / PVs / PVCs
- RBAC and cluster security
- Cluster monitoring and observability
- Node replacement & cluster recovery
- High-availability Kubernetes environments
If you are a hands-on Platform Engineer who has built and operated self-managed Kubernetes clusters using technologies such as kubeadm, Kubespray, Rancher/RKE or OpenShift , we'd be interested in hearing from you.
Platform Engineer in London employer: Hlx Life Sciences
As a leading CRO, we pride ourselves on fostering a collaborative and dynamic work environment that empowers our Clinical Research Associates to thrive. With a focus on global clinical trials, we offer unique opportunities for professional growth and development, particularly for those fluent in French and English, while supporting a diverse range of therapeutic areas. Our commitment to employee well-being and flexible working arrangements ensures that you can balance your career with personal commitments, making us an excellent employer for those seeking meaningful and rewarding work in the UK.
