Kubernetes Platform Engineer

Platform Engineering & Cloud Infrastructure | Auckland, New Zealand

Our client is a global, engineering and infrastructure management and development consultancy with a fast-growing Auckland presence. Off the back of increasing digital delivery demand across their engineering and infrastructure programmes, they're looking to strengthen their platform engineering capability while senior technical staff stay focused on delivery.

This is genuinely large-scale, production Kubernetes work — not a role for someone who's only run a dev cluster or a small proof-of-concept environment. It's a great fit for an engineer who enjoys solving real networking, security and platform-design problems, and who wants contract flexibility without trading away challenging work.

You'll be building and running the platform foundations that other engineering teams build on top of — clusters, charts, networking and guardrails — with genuine scope to shape how the internal developer platform evolves, while staying close enough to the wider team to bring operator and automation work into the role. Security posture is going to be really important so 'Zero Trust' is critical in this role, you are going to be working on some of the most complex problems in the world and that's no exaggeration.

You will be actively involved in operating and evolving large-scale, production Kubernetes clusters.

Authoring and maintaining Helm charts used across multiple teams and environments.

Developing Kubernetes operators in Go to automate platform lifecycle management.

Owning cluster networking — CNI, ingress/egress, service mesh and network policy.

Baking security into the platform by design — RBAC, secrets management, image scanning and vulnerability remediation.

Contributing to the design of an internal developer platform, improving self-service and developer experience.

Proven, hands-on experience operating large-scale Kubernetes deployments in production.

Strong networking fundamentals and a genuinely security-first mindset.

Hands-on experience authoring and maintaining Helm charts.

Kubernetes operator development in Go, and experience with internal developer platforms, is strongly regarded.

Exposure to AI security, and familiarity with auth protocols such as OAuth2, OIDC or SAML, is a plus.

Availability for a 6-month contract engagement - this is a long pipeline of work that will go on for longer than 12 months.

Genuinely large-scale platform engineering work — not BAU support on a small environment.

Join an employee-owned, digitally focused consultancy with real scope to shape the platform.

Contract flexibility with a strong path to extension.