Senior / Lead Platform Engineer

Start: immediately
Location: Remote, EU, Ukraine
Workload: full-time, 40 h/week
Start: ASAP
Language: English min. B2
Experience: 7 Years+
Contract: flexible; 6 months fixed, option to convert to permanent
Rate: open to proposals

CONTEXT
An agentic enterprise AI platform, currently running in the cloud (per customer).
They are building an on-prem version for customer / colocation data centers.
This is a founding engineer role for the on-prem product: the candidate builds the tooling so customers can install, upgrade, back up, restore and troubleshoot the platform without Kubernetes knowledge.

MUST-HAVE
Kubernetes in production (strong, hands-on)
Writing and maintaining Kubernetes operators (CRDs, controllers)
Building a CLI / lifecycle tooling: install, configure, upgrade, scale, backup, restore
Distributed, microservice-based systems
Platform engineering / developer tooling / internal infra products
Load, stress and resilience testing, performance baselines and sizing
Operational security, secure deployments, incident response
Strong in at least 2 programming languages (Go is a natural fit for operators/CLI)
Product mindset, ownership, good communication (English, German is a plus)
Lead-level seniority: able to shape technical decisions

NICE-TO-HAVE
SUSE Rancher, k3s
On-prem deployments in customer environments
Azure
.NET 10, ASP.NET Core, Aspire
Self-hosted / customer-operated products, installers, appliances
Security-sensitive or regulated environments
Functional programming / formal verification

CANDIDATE PROFILE
Senior/Lead, ideally 7+ years, with clear on-prem Kubernetes experience
Available to start immediately