Kubernetes Operations Engineer

Location: Sweden (Hybrid)

Level: Mid-Senior

Security Clearance: Swedish Security Level 2SE required

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for an experienced Kubernetes Operations Engineer to join our team in Sweden on a consulting basis. In this role you will be responsible for the day-to-day administration, stability, security and lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters - whether self-managed (kubeadm, Rancher, OpenShift) or managed cloud offerings (AKS, EKS, GKE). You will work closely with development, platform and security teams to ensure container workloads run reliably, efficiently and securely at scale.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Administer, maintain and upgrade Kubernetes clusters across development, staging and production environments

• Monitor cluster health, node performance and workload availability using Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager and Loki or equivalent observability stacks

• Manage cluster networking: CNI plugins (Calico, Flannel, Cilium), Ingress controllers (NGINX, Traefik), Network Policies and Service Mesh (Istio or Linkerd) where applicable

• Administer storage: Persistent Volumes, Storage Classes, dynamic provisioning and integration with NFS, Ceph, Longhorn or cloud-native storage backends

• Implement and enforce Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Pod Security Standards, network policies and secrets management (Vault, Sealed Secrets or native Kubernetes Secrets)

• Manage cluster lifecycle including node provisioning, certificate rotation, etcd backup and recovery, and control-plane upgrades

• Operate and troubleshoot Helm-managed releases; maintain Helm charts and oversee chart versioning and rollbacks

• Support GitOps workflows using Argo CD or Flux for declarative cluster state management

• Collaborate with development teams on resource quotas, limit ranges, HPA/VPA autoscaling and workload scheduling

• Perform capacity planning, cost optimisation and rightsizing of cluster resources

• Respond to and resolve incidents involving cluster components, networking, storage and application workloads

• Maintain documentation of cluster architecture, runbooks and operational procedures

• Participate in on-call rotation as required

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 4+ years of hands-on Kubernetes operations experience in production environments

• Strong knowledge of Kubernetes core concepts: Pods, Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, Services, ConfigMaps, Secrets, RBAC and Namespaces

• Experience administering self-managed clusters (kubeadm) and/or managed Kubernetes services (AKS, EKS or GKE)

• Solid understanding of Kubernetes networking: CNI plugins, Ingress, DNS (CoreDNS), Network Policies and Load Balancing

• Experience with cluster monitoring and observability: Prometheus, Grafana and Alertmanager

• Proficiency in Helm for package management and release lifecycle

• Hands-on experience with etcd backup/restore, certificate management and control-plane troubleshooting

• Scripting skills in Bash and/or Python for automation and operational tasks

• Familiarity with container runtimes: containerd, CRI-O or Docker

• Experience with Linux (RHEL, Ubuntu or equivalent) as the underlying node OS

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience with GitOps tooling: Argo CD or Flux for declarative continuous delivery

• Knowledge of Service Mesh technologies: Istio or Linkerd for traffic management and mTLS

• Familiarity with Kubernetes security tooling: Falco, OPA/Gatekeeper, Kyverno or Trivy

• Experience with cluster autoscaling: Cluster Autoscaler, KEDA or Karpenter

• Exposure to OpenShift or Rancher enterprise Kubernetes platforms

• Infrastructure-as-Code experience with Terraform or Ansible for cluster provisioning and configuration

• Kubernetes certifications: CKA (Certified Kubernetes Administrator) or CKS (Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist) strongly preferred

• Familiarity with cloud networking and IAM in AWS, Azure or GCP in the context of managed Kubernetes

• Background in ITIL or structured service management frameworks

SECURITY CLEARANCE REQUIREMENT

⚠️ This position requires Swedish Security Clearance Level 2SE (Säkerhetsskyddad anställning, nivå 2).

An extended background check will be conducted as part of the hiring process. To be eligible, candidates must have resided in Sweden for the past 3 years without interruption. Candidates who do not meet this residency requirement cannot be considered for this role.