Principal Platform Engineer – Kubernetes Reliability and Distributed Systems

Principal Platform Engineer – Kubernetes Reliability and Distributed Systems

This role has been designed as 'Hybrid' with a requirement that you will work on average 2 days per week from an HPE office.

Who We Are:

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud company advancing the way people live and work. We help companies connect, protect, analyze, and act on their data and applications wherever they live, from edge to cloud, so they can turn insights into outcomes at the speed required to thrive in today’s complex world. Our culture thrives on finding new and better ways to accelerate what’s next. We know varied backgrounds are valued and succeed here. We have the flexibility to manage our work and personal needs. We make bold moves, together, and are a force for good. If you are looking to stretch and grow your career our culture will embrace you. Open up opportunities with HPE.

Job Description:

Role overview We are seeking a Principal Platform Engineer with deep expertise in Kubernetes, distributed systems, and highly available infrastructure to help evolve and operate the Object Storage platform. This role will own the most complex platform-level technical challenges, including Kubernetes scheduling and resource management, pod failover, service discovery and load balancing, control-plane availability, node failure recovery, timeout behavior, and system resilience during degraded operating conditions. The successful candidate will work across engineering teams to establish clear ownership, diagnose complex production issues, guide architectural decisions, and build scalable, reliable platform capabilities. This is a hands-on technical leadership role that requires both deep implementation experience and the ability to influence engineering practices across the organization.

Key responsibilities

• Serve as the senior technical authority for Kubernetes platform architecture, reliability, and operational behavior.
• Own the investigation and resolution of complex issues involving:
• Pod failover and rescheduling
• Service availability and load balancing
• Control Plane operation as well as Node failover
• Network, API, and service timeouts
• Resource requests, limits, quotas, scheduling, affinity, taints, tolerations, and workload pinning
• Cluster capacity, performance, and scaling
• Distributed-system failure modes and recovery behavior
• Define and drive improvements to Kubernetes high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster-recovery strategies.
• Establish clear technical ownership and operating models for platform capabilities.
• Lead architecture, design, and implementation of platform improvements across multiple engineering teams.
• Develop repeatable approaches for diagnosing failures across application, Kubernetes, networking, storage, and infrastructure layers.
• Improve observability, including metrics, logs, traces, alerts, dashboards, and health indicators for platform services.
• Define and monitor service-level objectives and reliability measures for platform components.
• Lead or support major incident response, root-cause analysis, and corrective-action programs.
• Identify systemic issues rather than treating incidents as isolated events.
• Create technical standards, reference architectures, runbooks, and operational best practices.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the organization’s expertise in Kubernetes and distributed systems.
• Partner with application, infrastructure, networking, security, and operations teams to resolve cross-functional issues.
• Evaluate new Kubernetes capabilities and platform technologies and determine where they provide meaningful value.
• Balance short-term incident resolution with long-term architectural improvements.

Required qualifications

• Significant experience designing, building, and operating production Kubernetes platforms.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes architecture and core components, including:
• API server and control-plane services
• Scheduler and controller manager
• Nodes, kubelet, and container runtimes
• Services, endpoints, ingress, and load balancing
• Resource requests and limits
• Quality of Service classes
• Affinity, anti-affinity, taints, tolerations, and topology constraints
• Pod disruption budgets and workload availability
• Kubelet and CRI (containerd)
• Strong knowledge of high-availability and failure-recovery patterns for distributed systems.
• Demonstrated experience troubleshooting complex production failures involving Kubernetes, networking, infrastructure, and application services.
• Experience diagnosing Kubernetes failover behavior, service timeouts, partial failures, network partitions, and degraded cluster states.
• Experience with Kubernetes cluster upgrade process.
• Strong understanding of Linux systems, networking, DNS, TCP/IP, containers, and storage fundamentals.
• Experience with cloud or on-premises infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Proficiency in Go, Python, and Bash programming or scripting language.
• Experience developing automation, platform tooling, or operational frameworks.
• Strong observability and reliability engineering experience using metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and performance analysis.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical initiatives across organizational boundaries.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical issues to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to operate effectively during high-severity incidents and drive issues through root cause and permanent resolution.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience contributing to or extending Kubernetes, container-runtime, networking, or infrastructure projects.
• Experience with Kubernetes distributions such as EKS, AKS, GKE, OpenShift, or upstream Kubernetes.
• Experience with service meshes, ingress controllers, CNI plugins, CSI storage systems, or cluster-autoscaling technologies.
• Experience with distributed databases, consensus systems, or control-plane technologies such as etcd.
• Experience designing multi-cluster, multi-region, or edge-oriented Kubernetes environments.
• Knowledge of Linux performance analysis, kernel behavior, and container isolation.
• Experience with chaos engineering, failure injection, load testing, and resilience testing.
• Experience establishing SLOs, error budgets, production-readiness reviews, and reliability governance.
• Experience working in an environment with embedded, edge, fleet, or geographically distributed systems.
• Familiarity with GitOps and deployment technologies such as Argo CD, Flux, Helm, or similar tools.
• Relevant Kubernetes or cloud certifications, such as CKA, CKAD, or equivalent practical experience.

Principal-level expectations

The person hired into this role should be expected to:

• Own problems that cross team and technology boundaries.
• Make architecture decisions that affect the broader platform and product roadmap.
• Establish technical direction rather than only implement assigned designs.
• Drive ambiguous, high-impact issues from symptoms through root cause and permanent resolution.
• Create reusable platform capabilities and engineering standards.
• Influence without relying on direct authority.
• Mentor other senior engineers and improve the organization’s technical maturity.
• Remain hands-on enough to debug systems, prototype solutions, review code, and validate designs.

Accessibility

HPE is committed to creating an inclusive and accessible workplace and encourages applications from all qualified individuals, including those with disabilities. If you believe you require accommodation during any stage of the application or interview process, please submit your request by completing our secure form linked here.

Note: This option is reserved for applicants needing assistance/reasonable accommodation related to a disability.

What We Can Offer You:

Health & Wellbeing We strive to provide our team members and their loved ones with a comprehensive suite of benefits that supports their physical, financial and emotional wellbeing.

Personal & Professional Development We also invest in your career because the better you are, the better we all are. We have specific programs catered to helping you reach any career goals you have - whether you want to become a knowledge expert in your field or apply your skills to another division.

Unconditional Inclusion We are unconditionally inclusive in the way we work and celebrate individual uniqueness. We know varied backgrounds are valued and succeed here. We have the flexibility to manage our work and personal needs. We make bold moves, together, and are a force for good.

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Job:

EngineeringJob Level:

TCP_05 "The expected salary/wage range for this position is provided below. Actual offer may vary from this range based upon geographic location, work experience, education/training, and/or skill level.

• United States of America: Annual Salary USD 165,500 - 313,500 in Colorado // 157,000 - 361,000 in North Carolina The listed salary range reflects base salary. Variable incentives may also be offered."

Information about employee benefits offered in the US can be found at https://myhperewards.com/main/new-hire-enrollment.html

The estimated job application period closure is January 11 2027; this timeline is provided for transparency and internal planning purposes.

HPE is an Equal Employment Opportunity/ Veterans/Disabled/LGBT employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or any other protected category, and all decisions we make are made on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need. Our goal is to be one global team that is representative of our customers, in an inclusive environment where we can continue to innovate and grow together. Please click here: Equal Employment Opportunity.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is EEO Protected Veteran/ Individual with Disabilities.

HPE will comply with all applicable laws related to employer use of arrest and conviction records, including laws requiring employers to consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories.

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