Kubernetes & Bare Metal Engineer, ISS

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Kubernetes & Bare Metal Engineer – Member of Technical Staff About Infrastructure Shared Services (ISS) Infrastructure Shared Services (ISS) is responsible for Pure Storage’s engineering infrastructure, development environments, and production-adjacent services across our global data centers and public cloud environments. We partner with internal engineering teams to deliver reliable, secure, and scalable platforms so they can focus on building high‑quality products.

Within ISS, the Bare Metal Kubernetes Platform team designs, builds, and operates large‑scale Kubernetes environments on bare metal servers, backed by Pure Storage arrays and Portworx, and integrated with ISS’s observability, CI/CD, and multi‑tenancy frameworks.

Role Summary As an Bare Metal & Kubernetes Engineer , you will be a senior individual contributor responsible for designing, deploying, and operating large‑scale bare‑metal Kubernetes clusters and platform services in our on‑prem data centers.

You Will

• Lead technical design and implementation for new cluster features and capabilities
• Own critical areas of the platform (e.g., cluster lifecycle, networking, storage, observability, or multi‑tenancy)
• Drive reliability, performance, and security of the Kubernetes platform used by multiple business units
• Mentor other engineers and influence best practices across ISS and partner teams

Key Responsibilities Platform Design & Architecture

• Design and evolve bare‑metal Kubernetes architectures including control plane, worker nodes, networking, and storage integrations (Portworx on FlashArray/FlashBlade).
• Define standards for cluster lifecycle management (provisioning, upgrades, decommissioning) using tools like Kubespray, Foreman, and internal CD pipelines.
• Contribute to design of multi‑tenant, secure clusters including RBAC, OIDC/SSO, namespace isolation, and quota/limit strategies.

Implementation & Operations

• Deploy, operate, and continuously improve large‑scale bare‑metal Kubernetes clusters across multiple data centers (dev, stg, prod).
• Implement and maintain cluster networking: CNI (e.g., Cilium), BGP, load balancers, ingress, and multi‑rack/ToR topologies.
• Build and maintain GitOps‑based workflows (e.g., ArgoCD) and CI/CD pipelines to manage cluster add‑ons, platform services, and tenant workloads.
• Ensure observability of the platform (metrics, logs, traces) using Prometheus, Elastic stack, Grafana, and related tooling; define SLOs and alerts with SRE teams.
• Participate in “follow the sun” on call for the production system. Lead or contribute the incident management and incident postmortem

Reliability, Security & Compliance

• Own and improve reliability and performance of clusters and platform components; lead root cause analysis and long‑term fixes for complex incidents.
• Implement and enforce security best practices for Kubernetes, including secure defaults, RBAC policies, network policies, and secrets management.
• Collaborate with SRE, Security, and Network Engineering to meet agreed SLIs/SLOs and support models for on‑prem Kubernetes.

Collaboration & Leadership

• Partner closely with BU engineering teams (e.g., GitHub Actions runners, ELK, KubeVirt workloads) to onboard and run production use cases on the bare‑metal clusters.
• Provide technical leadership on cross‑team projects: lead design reviews, write design docs, and drive decisions that balance reliability, cost, and user experience.
• Mentor junior and mid‑level engineers, sharing best practices in Kubernetes, automation, and production operations.

Minimum Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in infrastructure, SRE, or platform engineering roles, including at least 3 years running Kubernetes in production, with significant experience on bare metal.
• Strong proficiency in Linux systems administration, networking, performance tuning, and security hardening.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes internals (API server, etcd, controllers, scheduler, kubelet) and key concepts (Pods, Deployments, Services, Ingress, ConfigMaps, Secrets, HPA).
• Hands‑on experience with Kubernetes networking: CNI plugins (preferably Cilium), Services/Ingress, NetworkPolicies, and L4/L7 load‑balancing.
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automation tools such as Ansible, Terraform, or equivalent.
• Strong experience with observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Elastic/ELK, Grafana, Fluentd/Fluent Bit) for cluster and workload monitoring.
• Solid scripting or programming skills (e.g., Python, Go, or similar) for automation, tooling, and integration work.
• Excellent communication and documentation skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively across distributed teams and write clear technical documentation and runbooks.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building or operating KubeVirt or other virtualization solutions on top of Kubernetes.
• Prior work with on‑prem GitHub Actions runners or similar CI/CD runners on Kubernetes (cloud or bare metal).
• Familiarity with Portworx and Pure Storage arrays as persistent storage for Kubernetes clusters.
• Experience in multi‑tenant platform design: authentication via OIDC/Okta, RBAC design, tenant isolation, and self‑service onboarding flows.
• Background in data center networking (BGP, MLAG, ECMP, spine‑leaf architectures) and how it interacts with Kubernetes networking at scale.
• Hands‑on experience with OpenStack in production (Nova, Neutron, Cinder) and integration patterns between OpenStack, Kubernetes, and on‑prem infrastructure.

What You Can Expect From Us

• Innovation: We celebrate those who think critically, like a challenge, and aspire to be trailblazers.
• Growth: We give you the space and support to grow along with us and to contribute to something meaningful. We have been named Fortune's Best Workplaces in Technology™, Fortune's Best Workplaces in the Bay Area™, and certified as a Great Place to Work®!
• Team: We build each other up and set aside ego for the greater good.

And because we understand the value of bringing your full and best self to work, we offer a variety of perks to manage a healthy balance, including flexible time off, wellness resources, and company-sponsored team events. Check out purebenefits.com for more information.

Accommodations And Accessibility Candidates with disabilities may request accommodations for all aspects of our hiring process. For more on this, contact us at TA-Ops@purestorage.com if you’re invited to an interview.

Our Commitment To a Strong And Inclusive Team We’re forging a future where everyone finds their rightful place and where every voice matters. Where uniqueness isn’t just accepted but embraced. That’s why we are committed to fostering the growth and development of every person, cultivating a sense of community through our Employee Resource Groups and advocating for inclusive leadership.

Everpure is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or any other characteristic legally protected by the laws of the jurisdiction in which you are being considered for hire.

Join us and bring your best. Bring your bold. Pure and simple.