Critical Skills to Possess:
Kubernetes & Container Orchestration
? 3+ years of production Kubernetes experience; bare-metal / on-premises
experience is mandatory ? cloud-managed Kubernetes experience alone does not
qualify
? Hands-on Helm chart authoring (not just consumption), ArgoCD or equivalent
GitOps tooling, and cert-manager
? Deep understanding of Kubernetes control plane HA: etcd Raft quorum, leader
election, minimum viable node counts
? Experience with MetalLB and Traefik or equivalent bare-metal ingress and load
balancing tools
Messaging & Streaming
? Production hands-on experience with Apache Kafka: topic configuration, partition
sizing, replication factor, consumer group management, KRaft mode
? Solid understanding of consumer lag monitoring and back-pressure patterns under
burst load
? Strong familiarity with MQTT protocol semantics: persistent sessions, QoS levels,
TLS mutual authentication; hands-on experience with EMQX or a comparable
broker at tens-of-thousands of concurrent connections
Data Infrastructure
? Production hands-on experience with PostgreSQL HA: Patroni-based automatic
failover, PgBouncer connection pooling, streaming replication, PITR with
pgBackRest or equivalent
? Working knowledge of Valkey / Redis: cluster mode, TTL-based caching, atomic
counter operations
Observability
? Hands-on deployment and configuration of VictoriaMetrics / Prometheus,
Grafana, Loki, Tempo, and Alertmanager
? Ability to write PromQL / MetricsQL queries and author production Grafana
dashboards from scratch
? Experience configuring alert deduplication and grouping in Alertmanager for high
volume event storms
Security & Secrets
? Hands-on experience with HashiCorp Vault / OpenBao: PKI secrets engine,
Kubernetes auth method, dynamic secrets
? Experience with container image CVE scanning (Trivy or equivalent) and a self
hosted container registry (Harbor or equivalent)
? Understanding of TLS certificate lifecycle management: internal CA, automated
rotation, mTLS between services
CI/CD & GitOps
? Experience building CI pipelines with real service dependency testing
(testcontainers-go or equivalent)
? GitOps workflow discipline: Git as the sole source of cluster state truth, PR-gated
deployment approvals
Programming
? Go (Golang): able to read, debug, and modify existing microservice code ? trace
latency issues through service logic, adjust Kafka consumer configuration, update
retry semantics; authoring new services from scratch is not required
? Bash scripting for automation and operational runbooks
? Strong proficiency with YAML / TOML for Kubernetes manifests, Helm values, and
service configuration
Networking
? Understanding of TCP/TLS at scale: TLS handshake cost, session resumption
overhead, connection state memory at 30,000 simultaneous connections
? Working knowledge of data centre networking concepts (MLAG, VLAN, MTU, ToR
design); able to collaborate effectively with a dedicated networking team
Preferred Qualifications:
- BS degree in Computer Science or Engineering or equivalent experience