Senior Platform Engineer/EKS

N-iX is looking for Senior Platform Engineer/EKS to join the team

Client Overview:
Our client is an Azerbaijani telecommunications company, the largest mobile network operator in Azerbaijan. The main products are: Fixed telephony, Mobile telephony, Internet services, Wireless broadband, and Value-added services.

Project Objectives:
The primary goal is to accelerate the client’s Data & AI initiatives via a secure, hybrid cloud foundation on AWS while systematically modernizing the IT estate as part of the cloud migration.

Key Project Objectives include:

- Cloud Foundation & Landing Zone: Deploy target hybrid network architectures, establishing a secure Landing Zone and hybrid Data/AI platforms on AWS.

- Security, Compliance & Governance: Operationalize on-prem tokenization (achieving zero raw PII in the cloud), resolve policy blockers to include AWS in the ISMS, and establish a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to govern Cloud adoption.

- AI Chatbot & Voicebot Design & Implementation: Develop and operationalize a flagship Customer Care Chatbot and Voicebot as the first hybrid-setup consumer.

Key Responsibilities:

- Design, provision, and maintain production-grade Amazon EKS clusters across AWS cloud and on-premises environments using EKS Hybrid Nodes with Cilium VXLAN CNI overlay networking.

- Implement dynamic node autoscaling and OS lifecycle management using Karpenter and immutable Bottlerocket node images across cloud and hybrid compute nodes.

- Configure and manage EMR-on-EKS platform runtimes to execute distributed Big Data and PySpark batch/streaming analytics workloads.

- Provision, optimize, and manage specialized GPU node pools (NVIDIA A100/L40S / EC2 GPU instances) for Azerbaijani SLM/LLM model training, fine-tuning, and low-latency speech inference (ASR / TTS voicebot pipelines).

- Implement automated GitOps continuous deployment workflows using Argo CD and Helm charts for all Kubernetes platform components and application workloads.

- Enforce cluster security, governance, and compliance using Kubernetes admission controllers and policy engines (e.g., OPA / Kyverno) alongside fine-grained Workload Identity (IRSA / Pod Identities).

- Build and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) templates using Terraform and AWS CDK integrated into GitLab CI/CD pipelines for repeatable cluster lifecycle management.

- Implement container microsegmentation, network security policies, and split-horizon DNS resolution across hybrid VPCs and on-premises substrates.

- Integrate platform logging, metrics, and trace telemetry with Amazon CloudWatch and central on-premises Splunk / SOC SIEM ingestion pipelines.

- Author technical documentation, cluster operational runbooks, disaster recovery (DR) procedures, and platform upgrade playbooks.

Requirements:

Mandatory Technical Skills:

- 4+ years of hands-on experience in Platform Engineering, DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineering with a primary focus on enterprise Kubernetes / Amazon EKS.

- Deep expertise with Amazon EKS, including EKS Hybrid Nodes architecture, Cilium CNI (VXLAN), and hybrid networking topologies.

- Strong experience in cloud-native autoscaling using Karpenter and container-optimized operating systems (Bottlerocket).

- Practical experience setting up and operating EMR-on-EKS for distributed data processing and Spark runtimes.

- Hands-on experience with GPU node pool orchestration for AI/ML workloads, LLM/SLM serving, and real-time speech/voicebot inference.

- Proficient with GitOps release methodologies using Argo CD, Helm, and automated CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI).

- Solid knowledge of Kubernetes security, admission control (OPA / Kyverno), RBAC, secrets management (HashiCorp Vault / CyberArk), and pod security standards.

- Strong proficiency in Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform or AWS CDK.

Strong Plus (Nice-to-Have Skills):

- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) and/or Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)

- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional.

- Experience in telecom domain infrastructure, low-latency real-time voice/chat processing, or hybrid cloud data sovereignty architectures.

- Familiarity with AWS Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA), AWS Transit Gateway, and AWS Lake Formation.

Soft Skills & Team Fit:

- Strong critical thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills.

- Excellent communication and collaboration skills to work closely with cross-functional teams (Data Engineering, MLOps, Cloud/Network, Security).

- Results-oriented, proactive mindset with strong ownership of deliverables within an Agile / Scrum framework.

- Upper-Intermediate+ English level (written and spoken).

We offer*:

- Flexible working format - remote, office-based or flexible

- A competitive salary and good compensation package

- Personalized career growth

- Professional development tools (mentorship program, tech talks and trainings, centers of excellence, and more)

- Active tech communities with regular knowledge sharing

- Education reimbursement

- Memorable anniversary presents

- Corporate events and team buildings

- Other location-specific benefits

*not applicable for freelancers