Azure Platform Engineer (Remote Ontario)

The Azure Kubernetes Platform Engineer is responsible for designing, deploying, and operating production-grade Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters, with a strong focus on cluster internals, networking, security hardening, and reliability. This role owns the platform end-to-end from cluster architecture and CI/CD through to performance tuning, observability, and incident response for critical systems. Acting as the SME for Kubernetes deployments, blockers, and production issues. The successful candidate works closely with application, security, and platform teams to keep AKS environments reliable, observable, and production-ready.

Responsibilities:

Act as the subject-matter expert (SME) for Kubernetes deployments, troubleshooting, and production issues across all environments.
Design and deploy Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters with private cluster configurations, managed identities, and RBAC.
Own the health, scaling, and lifecycle management of production AKS clusters, including upgrades, node pool management, autoscaling, and capacity planning.
Configure AKS networking, including Azure CNI, internal load balancers, and ingress controllers (NGINX, Traefik).
Design and maintain integrations between AKS with Azure Container Registry (ACR), Key Vault via CSI driver, Azure Monitor for containers, Azure SQL, Kafka/Event Hubs, Azure Storage, and other client-facing dependencies (DNS resolution, firewall rules, private endpoints, and service connectivity).
Manage containerized application deployments using Docker and Helm; maintain reusable chart and templating standards, namespaces, resource quotas, and Azure Policy for AKS. 
Harden AKS environments through policy enforcement, network policies, and image scanning.
Own container and cluster vulnerability management: scanning, triage, prioritization, and remediation coordination with engineering teams.
Contribute to Terraform-based infrastructure as code for provisioning and managing Azure resources.
Support Azure DevOps (or equivalent) CI/CD pipelines, including GitOps workflows (Flux/ArgoCD), to reduce deployment risk and improve release velocity.
Design, implement, and manage observability across the Grafana stack (Prometheus, Loki, Tempo) and Azure-native tooling (Azure Monitor, Log Analytics Workspace, Application Insights) for critical systems; define SLIs/SLOs and tune alerting to reduce noise.
Collaborate with performance engineering and application teams to identify, diagnose, and resolve performance bottlenecks spanning the AKS platform and its dependent services (database, messaging, network) to right-size node pools and workloads based on observed performance and utilization trends.
Contributing to Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning (DR/BCP) procedures for AKS-hosted workloads, including cross-team failover drill participation and RTO/RPO validation.
Provide escalation support for production Kubernetes and infrastructure incidents; participate in on-call rotation, lead root-cause analysis, and drive preventative follow-up actions.
Document runbooks and post-incident reviews, and operational knowledge; maintain a living knowledge base to reduce tribal knowledge.

5+ years of hands-on Kubernetes experience
Strong knowledge of Kubernetes internals: scheduling, networking, storage, RBAC.
Proficiency in Azure CNI networking and AKS private cluster configuration.
Hands-on experience with Azure PaaS services (ACR, AKV, Azure SQL, Kafka and Managed Identities) and troubleshooting network-layer dependencies (DNS, firewall, private endpoints).
Experience with Helm
Working knowledge of Terraform for infrastructure as code.
Working knowledge of Azure DevOps or similar CI/CD tooling.
Practical experience with container/cluster vulnerability management and remediation workflows.
Scripting skills in Bash and Python.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to convey technical issues clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.