Application Engineer
Posted 17 Aug 2026
Advertised as “Senior Application Engineer”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 8+ yrs
- Management level
- People management
Compensation
No salary listed for this role.
Role speciality
Kubernetes OperatorsPlatform EngineeringReliability EngineeringSecurity
Useful technologies
AKSArgo CDCiliumcontroller-runtimeEKSFluxGitOpsGKEGoGrafanaHelmIstioKubebuilderKubernetesLinkerdLinuxOperator SDKPrometheusTerraform
This is a senior, hands-on engineering role focused on Go development, Kubernetes Operators, platform automation, reliability, and security. You’ll work closely with Kubernetes architects, SRE, and cloud operations teams to turn complex operational processes into scalable, production-grade software.
What You’ll Do
- Design, build, and maintain Kubernetes Operators, controllers, CRDs, APIs, and automation using Go.
- Automate provisioning, upgrades, scaling, recovery, configuration, and other platform lifecycle workflows.
- Build reliable, observable, secure, and resilient controllers that handle retries, drift, failures, and changing cluster state.
- Develop strong automated test coverage and contribute to CI/CD, GitOps, Helm, and infrastructure automation.
- Integrate platform software across public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises Kubernetes environments.
- Apply secure Kubernetes practices including RBAC, secrets management, admission controls, and workload isolation.
- Improve platform reliability through observability, troubleshooting, post-incident improvements, and operational automation.
- Mentor engineers and help establish engineering standards and best practices.
What We’re Looking For
- 8+ years of experience in software, platform, cloud, DevOps, infrastructure automation, or SRE engineering.
- Strong production development experience with Go.
- Hands-on experience building Kubernetes Operators, controllers, CRDs, admission webhooks, or similar Kubernetes-native software.
- Strong understanding of Kubernetes APIs, reconciliation patterns, RBAC, finalizers, status conditions, and object lifecycle.
- Experience supporting production Kubernetes environments and distributed systems.
- Strong knowledge of automated testing, CI/CD, GitOps, Helm, Linux, containers, networking, storage, and Kubernetes troubleshooting.
- Experience applying Kubernetes security practices.
- Strong communication skills and experience mentoring or influencing other engineers.
Nice to Have
- Experience with technologies such as Kubebuilder, Operator SDK, controller-runtime, Terraform, Argo CD, Flux, EKS, AKS, GKE, Prometheus, Grafana, Istio, Linkerd, or Cilium, as well as experience in regulated or mission-critical environments.
- Relevant Kubernetes, Terraform, cloud DevOps, or Linux certifications are also beneficial.