Role Overview

Charles River Development is looking for an experienced Cloud Native Platform Engineer. The successful candidate will be responsible for automating and streamlining our operations and processes, building and maintaining tools for deployment, monitoring, and operations as well as troubleshooting and resolving issues in our development, test, and production environments. Our ideal candidate is proficient with Kubernetes, container orchestration, CI/CD pipelines, and cloud platforms. They should also be familiar with the software development lifecycle and have a deep understanding of modern DevOps tools and practices.

The successful candidate will partner closely with internal engineering teams, architects, product leaders, and external clients to ensure platform solutions are scalable, secure, and aligned with both business objectives and emerging technology trends.

Key Responsibilities

Azure Kubernetes Platform Strategy

• Design, build, and operate enterprise-grade Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) platforms supporting mission-critical workloads

• Manage multi-cluster and multi-region AKS deployments with high availability and disaster recovery strategies

• Own platform lifecycle management including version upgrades, patching, node pool management, and cluster hardening

• Define and enforce standardized AKS architecture patterns across environments (dev, non-prod, prod)

Cloud-Native Infrastructure & Workload Enablement

• Partner with application teams to onboard and modernize workloads into containerized, cloud-native architectures

• Enable scalable, resilient deployments using microservices, API-first, and event-driven patterns

• Support integration across enterprise systems (including hybrid/on-prem connectivity where required)

Automation, GitOps & Deployment Engineering

• Implement GitOps-based deployment models using tools like ArgoCD for consistent and auditable releases

• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines on Azure DevOps / GitHub Actions for Kubernetes workloads

• Develop Infrastructure as Code solutions using Terraform (preferred) for Azure resources and AKS provisioning

• Automate operational workflows including cluster provisioning, scaling, and recovery

Observability, Monitoring & Reliability Engineering

• Design and maintain platform observability frameworks using:

• Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace, Elasticsearch

• Azure Monitor, Log Analytics

• OpenTelemetry (where applicable)

• Ensure proactive monitoring of cluster health, application performance, and infrastructure metrics

• Drive incident management practices, root cause analysis (RCA), and continuous reliability improvements

• Define and enforce SLOs, SLIs, and platform health KPIs

Security, Networking & Compliance (Azure-focused)

• Implement secure AKS architectures including:

• Azure CNI / networking models

• Private clusters, network policies

• Identity (Managed Identity, Azure AD integration)

• Enforce container security and runtime protection (image scanning, policy enforcement)

• Integrate with Azure Key Vault for secrets management

• Ensure compliance with enterprise security and governance standards

Cross‑Functional Leadership

• Lead complex troubleshooting across Kubernetes, Azure infrastructure, and network layers

• Drive cost optimization and capacity management (FinOps practices) for AKS and Azure resources

• Serve as a bridge between Cloud Platform Engineering, Product, Architecture, and Business teams.

• Provide thought leadership on cloud native platforms, operating models, and platform governance.

Required Qualifications

Experience & Technical Skills

• Minimum 10 years of experience in cloud engineering organization, with platform engineering experience, or solution architecture roles.

• Extensive experience with Kubernetes, containers, and distributed systems

• Strong expertise in Azure (AKS), with exposure to multi-cloud (AWS/GCP) and cloud-native architectures.

• Hands-on experience with DevOps Platform Tooling (i.e) ArgoCD, Terraform, Azure Devops, scripting

• Operational experience with observability tools Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry

• Experience influencing or owning platform/product roadmaps in partnership with Product Management.

• Solid background in cloud native engineering concepts, performance optimization, security, and governance.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field

Soft Skills & Leadership Capabilities

• Strong communication and presentation skills, with the ability to influence senior leadership and client levels.

• Demonstrated ability to collaborate across engineering, product, architecture, and business teams.

• Emphasizes ownership, platform standards, and cross-team collaboration

• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and driving alignment across multiple stakeholders.

• Proven ability to mentor, coach, and inspire high-performing technical teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Financial Services industry experience is strongly preferred.

• Experience supporting regulated environments with strong data security, compliance, and governance requirements.

• Prior experience in customer-facing or consulting roles is a plus.

What Success Looks Like

• A clearly defined and well-executed Cloud Native adoption roadmap aligned to business and product priorities.

• Increased adoption and effective use of cloud native capabilities across engineering and client solutions.

• Strong partnerships with Product, Architecture, and Client teams, resulting in scalable, future-ready data solutions.

• Recognition as a trusted technology and platform leader within the organization.