Contract: Principal Kubernetes Platform Engineer

Upwork ($UPWK) is the world’s work marketplace. We serve everyone from one-person startups to over 30% of the Fortune 100 with a powerful, trust-driven platform that enables companies and talent to work together in new ways that unlock their potential.

Last year, more than $3.8 billion of work was done through Upwork by skilled professionals who are gaining more control by finding work they are passionate about and innovating their careers.

This is an engagement through Upwork’s Hybrid Workforce Solutions (HWS) Team. Our Hybrid Workforce Solutions Team is a global group of professionals that support Upwork’s business. Our HWS team members are located all over the world.

Upwork operates a robust Service Mesh ecosystem, enabling a decentralized application architecture designed to enhance security, resilience, observability, and control across applications. This approach leverages a data plane composed of application-level proxies to manage communication between distributed components and a control plane to oversee these proxies. It represents the evolution of microservices architectures, addressing the limitations of the traditional client library model, particularly the tight coupling of infrastructure concerns with application code. At the core of the Upwork’s Service Mesh lies the Kubernetes Orchestrator, specifically EKS, with Istio serving as the foundational mesh technology.

As a Principal Kubernetes Engineer you will lead the design, implementation, and optimization of our extensive Kubernetes-based infrastructure. You need to possess a deep understanding of kubernetes and its ecosystem, with proven expertise in architecting scalable, secure, and highly available containerized solutions.

You will work extensively with AWS services, mostly EKS, leveraging native tools and features to deliver cutting-edge cloud solutions. Expertise in Istio is critical for managing service meshes, traffic routing, and advanced observability features. You also need to demonstrate deep hands-on experience with ArgoCD to implement GitOps practices, enabling seamless CI/CD pipelines, and with Helm templating, creating modular, reusable templates for application deployment.

This is a technical leadership role that requires both design and implementation skills. As the expert on K8s and Service Mesh you’ll be the technical authority for the organization for these subjects.

We embrace diversity in knowledge and experience; people with different skill-sets and mindset comprise the platform engineering team, which aims at delivering the foundations of an efficient service delivery that has impact in our core product offering.

Must Haves (Required Skills):

• In depth knowledge and hands-on experience with microservices and Service Mesh architectures at scale. Specifically discovery, service to service communication patterns and high availability deployments on Kubernetes clusters based on Istio.
• In depth knowledge of the AWS cloud infrastructure and all its major components such  as VPC, IAM, EC2, ELB, Route53, KMS, Cloudwatch, Cloudtrail. and more specifically running EKS workloads.
• Expert level knowledge of Linux systems
• High level experience with at least one programming/scripting language such as Java, or Python as well as Bash in an enterprise environment.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure provisioning and continuous deployment with Terraform and ArgoCD as well as extensive experience with Helm as a templating tool.
• Extensive  knowledge of DevOps/GitOps and best practices for modern Devops Operations and software development.
• Experience with security best practices related to infrastructure and platform design.
• Experience with supporting ML workloads in Kubernetes cloud deployed clusters

In addition to the technical requirements you’ll need:

• Excellent communication skills to interact with all the stakeholders of the platform. These include service owners and fellow devops engineers and architects both within and outside the team.
• Proficiency in written professional English to create design and other supporting documents
• Extensive experience in troubleshooting complex issues in cooperation with SREs, service owners and other team members

Additional experience with the following is appreciated but not required:

• Multi-cluster architectures for Service Mesh and specifically with Istio multi-primary deployments

Upwork is proudly committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce. We never discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical condition), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

Additionally, to the extent permitted under applicable law, a criminal background check may be required as a condition of engagement.

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