Senior DevOps Engineer (PostgreSQL & Kafka on Kubernetes)

Join our team as a Senior DevOps Engineer, where you will be responsible for running the PostgreSQL and Apache Kafka platform behind k0rdent-ai, our multi-tenant control plane for enterprise GPU infrastructure. This hands-on role will involve deploying and operating PostgreSQL and Kafka on Kubernetes, managing automation, upgrades, observability, backups, and disaster recovery. You will also provide self-service access to databases and topics for product teams, and ensure the reliability, security, and recoverability of the platform.

• Deploy and operate PostgreSQL (CloudNativePG) and Kafka (Strimzi) on Kubernetes using operators, Helm, and GitOps.
• Design and operate high availability within each region and cross-region disaster recovery — PostgreSQL replica clusters, backups and point-in-time recovery, Kafka MirrorMaker 2.
• Build monitoring and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) for replication lag, backups, consumer lag, and capacity; participate in on-call and lead incident reviews.

• Reliability & DR: Designing and testing high availability and disaster recovery for stateful systems, with defined RPO/RTO
• Kubernetes: Strong hands-on Kubernetes operations — StatefulSets, persistent volumes and storage classes, pod disruption budgets, scheduling and affinity, network policies, and cluster upgrades — on cloud and/or bare-metal clusters
• GitOps & IaC: Day-to-day use of Argo CD or Flux, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar) in a declarative, review-driven workflow
• Kafka Operations: Running Kafka in production — brokers, topics and partitions, replication, consumer groups, monitoring, and capacity planning
• PostgreSQL Operations: Practical PostgreSQL administration — replication and failover, backup and point-in-time recovery, connection pooling (PgBouncer), version upgrades, and performance troubleshooting
• Operators & Helm: Production experience running PostgreSQL and/or Kafka through Kubernetes operators (CloudNativePG, Zalando, or Crunchy PGO; Strimzi, Confluent for Kubernetes, or similar), and authoring and maintaining Helm charts. Depth with one operator matters more than the specific product
• Automation: Strong scripting and programming in Go (preferred) or Python, plus Bash
• Experience: 8+ years in DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering, including 3+ years running stateful systems (databases or message streaming) in production
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, VictoriaMetrics)
• Cross-region replication (CloudNativePG replica clusters, Kafka MirrorMaker 2) and global/regional multi-site architectures
• Debezium, Kafka Connect, and transactional outbox / CDC patterns
• Identity integration for data platforms (Keycloak, OIDC, LDAP/Active Directory)
• Bare-metal infrastructure, Ceph or object storage, or GPU/AI infrastructure
• Secrets and security tooling (Vault/OpenBao, cert-manager, mTLS)
• Contributions to CloudNativePG, Strimzi, or related open-source projects
• Experience in SOC 2 or ISO 27001 environments