SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Mirantis is seeking a Senior Data Platform Engineer to design, deploy, and operate the PostgreSQL and Apache Kafka platform powering k0rdent-ai, a multi-tenant control plane for enterprise GPU infrastructure. This is a hands-on DevOps/SRE role focused on stateful systems running on Kubernetes across cloud and bare-metal clusters in a global architecture.
You will own the full lifecycle of PostgreSQL (CloudNativePG) and Kafka (Strimzi) clusters: deployment, upgrades, scaling, high availability, disaster recovery, backups, and point-in-time recovery. You will manage everything declaratively using Argo CD or Flux, Helm, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI). You will design cross-region replication strategies with defined RPO/RTO targets and conduct regular failover drills.
Key responsibilities include:
- Deploy and operate PostgreSQL and Kafka on Kubernetes using operators and Helm charts across cloud and bare-metal environments
- Implement GitOps and Infrastructure as Code practices with declarative configuration management
- Design and operate high availability and disaster recovery, including replica clusters, backups, and cross-region failover
- Build self-service platforms enabling product teams to provision databases, users, topics, and ACLs through code
- Establish observability and monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) for replication lag, backups, consumer lag, and capacity
- Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident reviews
- Implement security controls including TLS/mTLS, secrets management (Vault/OpenBao), network policies, Kafka ACLs, and per-tenant isolation
- Integrate database and Kafka access with identity platforms (Keycloak/OIDC)
- Operate change-data-capture and outbox pipelines (Debezium, Kafka Connect) for consistency between global and regional systems
- Write automation and tooling in Go or Python to eliminate manual work
- Partner with application teams on schema standards and performance optimization
Mirantis is a Silicon Valley-based Kubernetes-native AI infrastructure company, recognized as a leader in container management. The company combines open-source innovation with deep Kubernetes expertise to help enterprises build scalable, secure infrastructure for AI and data-intensive workloads.
REQUIREMENTS:
Must Have:
- 8+ years in DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering, with 3+ years running stateful systems (databases or message streaming) in production
- Strong hands-on Kubernetes operations: StatefulSets, persistent volumes and storage classes, pod disruption budgets, scheduling and affinity, network policies, cluster upgrades on cloud and/or bare-metal
- Production experience running PostgreSQL and/or Kafka through Kubernetes operators (CloudNativePG, Zalando PGO, Crunchy PGO, Strimzi, Confluent for Kubernetes, or similar); ability to author and maintain Helm charts
- Day-to-day use of Argo CD or Flux, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar) in declarative, review-driven workflows
- Practical PostgreSQL administration: replication and failover, backup and point-in-time recovery, connection pooling (PgBouncer), version upgrades, performance troubleshooting
- Production Kafka operations: brokers, topics and partitions, replication, consumer groups, monitoring, capacity planning
- Experience designing and testing high availability and disaster recovery for stateful systems with defined RPO/RTO
- Strong scripting and programming in Go (preferred) or Python, plus Bash
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience
Nice to Have:
- 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)
- Observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, VictoriaMetrics)
- Secrets and security tooling (Vault/OpenBao, cert-manager, mTLS)
- Bare-metal infrastructure, Ceph or object storage, or GPU/AI infrastructure experience
- Open-source contributions to CloudNativePG, Strimzi, or related projects
- SOC 2 or ISO 27001 compliance experience
