As a Senior Software Engineer on the team, you will work with Kubernetes cluster operational tasks like upgrading the Kubernetes version. This includes performing an analysis of what is changing in the new version and how it affects the workload running on each cluster, e.g. deprecated k8s APIs and controller compatibility. You’ll use tools to scan clusters for finding things that needs remediation, define actions for it, as well as executing them. As part of rolling out upgrades to hundreds of clusters, some ranging up to a thousand nodes, you will identify automation opportunities to reduce the amount of toil needed. 

To keep the runtime infrastructure secure you will roll out security patches to Kubernetes nodes (EC2 AMI updates) on a regular basis (PCI compliance demands new patches to be installed at least every 30 days) and help improve the automation tooling to eventually run this on an automated schedule. 

In order to keep our runtime cost low, you will take part in cost optimization efforts, like tweaking the Karpenter node scaling strategies, increasing the bin-packing efficiency of pods on nodes, ensuring the right node family type is used (m, c, r, spot and Graviton/ARM) and identifying over scaled infrastructure. 

To enable faster time to new markets and onboarding of new tenants to our streaming platform, you’ll work on automating the creation of new Kubernetes clusters together with bootstrapping of critical platform capabilities like service mesh, deployment systems and the observability stack. 

Preferred Skills

• At least 1-2 years of Kubernetes experience. 

• At least 1-2 years of AWS experience. 

• At least 5 years of software development, infrastructure management or operations experience. 

• Ability to write code for automation in python, bash or golang. 

• Experience with designing infrastructure CI/CD pipelines, e.g. Jenkins or GitHub Actions. 

• Experience with IaC, preferably Terraform. 

• Used to Helm templating for k8s manifests. 

• Understanding of how GitOps tooling like ArgoCD or Flux works. 

• Experience in rolling out infrastructure changes to production by following a change management workflow. 

• Knowing what metrics to monitor during a change rollout to identify problems. 

• Strong ownership mentality during rollouts, stop/rollback and fix if problems occur or escalate to management/on-call if getting stuck. 

• Strong sense of security, always using least privileges access and firewall configurations when needed for maintenance. 

• Understanding of how running workloads on the Kubernetes clusters may be affected by cluster changes or node rotations. 

• Willingness to talk to service development teams and understand their challenges when they report problems during maintenance windows. 

• Ability to define and measure KPIs and honor SLAs for infrastructure maintenance. 

• Experience with Git and GitHub PR workflows. 

• Experience in working with Agile – Sprints, Epics/Stories, Jira. 

How We Get Things Done… 

This last bit is probably the most important! Here at WBD, our guiding principles are the core values by which we operate and are central to how we get things done. You can find them at www.wbd.com/guiding-principles/  along with some insights from the team on what they mean and how they show up in their day to day. We hope they resonate with you and look forward to discussing them during your interview.