Site Reliability Engineer/cloud Platform

Cloud Platform / Site Reliability Engineer – Kubernetes, Automation & Private Cloud

Department: IT / Operations

Employment Type: Full-time

Location: Remote – Canada

Job Summary

ThinkOn is seeking a Cloud Platform / Site Reliability Engineer to operate, automate, scale, secure, and continuously improve the platforms that power ThinkOn’s private cloud services.

This role combines Site Reliability Engineering, Kubernetes platform engineering, Infrastructure-as-Code, observability, automation, and private cloud operations.

You will support ThinkOn’s current VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) environments, VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS), GPU-enabled infrastructure and platform services, while helping build capabilities that remain portable to upstream and open-source Kubernetes environments.

The successful candidate will take end-to-end operational ownership of platform services rather than operating within a single technology silo. You will troubleshoot across infrastructure, networking, storage, Kubernetes, observability and platform-service layers; automate repetitive work; improve reliability; and help transition new services from Architecture into Operations.

Key Responsibilities

Kubernetes & Kubernetes-as-a-Service

• Deploy, operate, scale, upgrade, troubleshoot and recover production Kubernetes clusters.
• Support VMware Supervisor, VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS), VCF Automation and upstream/open-source Kubernetes environments.
• Operate Kubernetes cluster lifecycle technologies including Cluster API and related controllers.
• Troubleshoot:
• Control plane and worker nodes
• MachineDeployments and node pools
• Controllers and operators
• CRDs
• Admission webhooks
• Scheduling and affinity
• RBAC and service accounts
• DNS
• Networking
• Storage
• Certificates
• Kubernetes APIs
• Develop and operate reusable Kubernetes-as-a-Service capabilities for tenant and customer environments.
• Support Kubernetes multi-tenancy, namespaces, quotas, policies, isolation and self-service.
• Maintain Kubernetes lifecycle processes including provisioning, scaling, remediation, upgrade, backup, recovery and retirement.

Infrastructure-as-Code & Automation

• Build and maintain infrastructure using Terraform.
• Develop reusable Terraform modules and standardized deployment patterns.
• Manage Terraform state, environment promotion and automated change workflows.
• Develop Ansible automation for platform and operating-system configuration.
• Use Python, Bash, PowerShell, APIs and SDKs to automate platform lifecycle activities.
• Integrate platform automation with CI/CD pipelines.
• Use vendor-neutral APIs and OpenAPI-based interfaces wherever practical.
• Continually identify and eliminate repetitive operational toil.

VMware Cloud Foundation

• Deploy, operate and lifecycle-manage VMware Cloud Foundation environments including:
• ESXi
• vCenter
• vSAN
• NSX
• SDDC Manager
• VCF Operations
• VCF Automation
• Supervisor
• VKS
• Perform platform upgrades, patching, lifecycle management and fleet operations.
• Support current and future VCF releases while maintaining operational practices that are portable to non-VMware platforms.
• Operate VCF through APIs, automation and Infrastructure-as-Code rather than relying solely on manual administration.

Site Reliability Engineering

• Apply SRE principles to production cloud and Kubernetes platforms.
• Define and maintain meaningful SLIs, SLOs and service-health indicators.
• Monitor service availability, latency, saturation, capacity and error conditions.
• Identify recurring failures and engineer permanent solutions rather than repeatedly applying manual fixes.
• Participate in production incident response and act as an incident owner where appropriate.
• Perform root cause analysis and blameless post-incident reviews.
• Track corrective actions through completion.
• Develop resilience, failure-recovery and disaster-recovery procedures.
• Perform capacity planning and identify platform scaling risks before they become incidents.
• Continuously improve MTTR, availability and operational efficiency.

Observability

• Build and operate observability capabilities using:
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• OpenTelemetry
• Zabbix
• Loki
• Fluent Bit
• Splunk or equivalent technologies
• Build Prometheus metrics, exporters, recording rules and alerts.
• Develop Grafana dashboards for:
• VMware infrastructure
• GPU infrastructure
• Platform services
• Capacity
• Performance
• Application and service health
• Integrate infrastructure, Kubernetes and application telemetry to support end-to-end troubleshooting.
• Implement distributed metrics, logs, events and telemetry collection using OpenTelemetry and related standards.

Networking & Load Balancing

• Troubleshoot networking across infrastructure and Kubernetes layers.
• Support:
• TCP/IP
• Routing
• DNS
• DHCP/IPAM
• VLAN/VXLAN
• BGP/EVPN
• MTU
• TLS
• Network policy
• Load balancing
• Operate VMware NSX and VPC-based networking.
• Support VMware Avi / NSX Advanced Load Balancer and equivalent load-balancing platforms.
• Operate Kubernetes Service, Ingress and Gateway API connectivity.
• Support Kubernetes CNI technologies including Antrea, Cilium, Calico, Multus or equivalent.
• Support multi-network and multi-NIC Kubernetes architectures where workload, storage or high-performance traffic requires isolation.
• Understand Kubernetes IPAM and advanced networking concepts.

Platform Services

Operate, troubleshoot and lifecycle-manage services such as:

• Harbor and OCI container registries
• HashiCorp Vault and secrets-management systems
• Certificate management and PKI
• Database-as-a-Service
• PostgreSQL and MySQL
• Velero and Kubernetes backup/recovery
• Redis and Kubernetes operators
• S3-compatible object storage
• OpenSearch and logging platforms
• Kubernetes policy and admission-control services
• Developer and platform self-service services

Support installation, configuration, upgrade, migration, backup, recovery, monitoring and operational handover for these services.

Security, Policy & Compliance

• Implement and maintain Kubernetes and infrastructure RBAC.
• Support federated identity and OIDC-based authentication.
• Operate certificate and credential lifecycle processes.
• Implement policy-as-code using technologies such as OPA Gatekeeper, Kyverno or equivalent.
• Detect and remediate configuration drift.
• Support automated security and compliance validation.
• Participate in vulnerability and CVE remediation.
• Support hardened Kubernetes node images and automated operating-system patching.
• Work with Security teams to meet Protected B, ITSG-33, PBMM and other applicable compliance requirements.

Storage & Data Services

• Troubleshoot Kubernetes persistent storage, CSI, storage classes, snapshots and volume lifecycle.
• Support S3-compatible object storage and object-storage consumption by Kubernetes and application workloads.
• Understand data protection requirements across both VM and Kubernetes workloads.

AI & GPU Platform Operations

• Support GPU-enabled infrastructure and Kubernetes environments.
• Operate and troubleshoot:
• NVIDIA GPU Operator
• vGPU
• MIG
• GPU scheduling
• GPU device plugins
• GPU licensing
• GPU node configuration
• High-performance networking
• RDMA where applicable

Platform APIs & Programmability

• Use REST APIs, OpenAPI specifications and platform SDKs to automate Day-1 and Day-2 operations.
• Develop platform integrations using Python, Terraform, PowerCLI and other appropriate tooling.
• Integrate infrastructure and platform APIs into GitLab CI/CD and operational workflows.
• Evaluate new platform capabilities and determine how they can be safely automated and operationalized.

Service Transition & Operational Ownership

• Work closely with Architecture during the introduction of new services and technologies.
• Participate in implementation and progressively assume operational ownership.
• Validate operational readiness including:
• Monitoring
• Alerting
• Capacity
• Backup
• Recovery
• Security
• Upgrade procedures
• Automation
• Documentation
• Create SOPs, runbooks and troubleshooting guides.
• Lead subsequent deployments and upgrades after initial architecture implementation.

Operational Redundancy

• Cross-train across critical platform services.
• Act as both primary and secondary owner of assigned technologies.
• Ensure routine operations and incident-response procedures can be performed by another engineer.
• Prevent single-person dependencies through:
• Documentation
• Automation
• Peer review
• Knowledge sharing
• Pairing
• Operational rotation

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Required Skills & Experience

• 5 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, Cloud Infrastructure, Kubernetes Engineering or a related field.
• Strong production Kubernetes administration and troubleshooting experience.
• Strong Linux administration and troubleshooting skills.
• Strong hands-on Terraform experience.
• Experience with Git-based engineering and Infrastructure-as-Code workflows.
• Strong experience with Prometheus and Grafana or comparable observability platforms.
• Understanding of Open Telemetry and modern metrics/logging architectures.
• Strong networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, routing, DNS, TLS and load balancing.
• Experience automating operational work using Python, Bash or equivalent languages.
• Experience supporting production incidents and performing root cause analysis.

⸻

Preferred Experience

• VMware Cloud Foundation 9.x
• VCF Automation
• VCF Operations
• VKS / VMware Supervisor
• Cluster API
• Argo CD or Flux
• OpenTelemetry
• Prometheus / Grafana / Loki
• Cilium / Calico / Antrea / Multus
• OPA Gatekee
• Velero
• cert-manager
• VMware Avi
• NSX
• vSAN
• S3-compatible object storage
• PostgreSQL or Database-as-a-Service
• NVIDIA GPU Operator / vGPU
• Kubernetes multi-tenancy
• Kubernetes-as-a-Service platforms

Certifications such as CKA, CKS, VMware VCP/VCAP/VCF, Terraform Associate or equivalent are beneficial but not required.