Requirement: Senior Engineer (Kubernetes Orchestrator)
Location: Braine-l'Alleud, BELGIUM
Full Time On-Site: Yes
Time On-Site: 100%
Not to Exceed Rate: 95 EUR
Total Scope of the request (hours): 1000
Required Start Date: 29 June 2026
End Contract Date: 31 December 2026
Required Security Clearance: NATO SECRET
Please do NOT apply for any NATO contract positions unless you meet ALL the following criteria:
- Current National or NATO SECRET clearance
- Nationality of one of the NATO member countries
- Current work visa for the specific location if applying for an in-country position
Duties & Role:
- Design, build, and evolve highly scalable, secure, and resilient Kubernetes platforms utilizing SUSE Rancher as the central management plane.
- Handle the end-to-end lifecycle of RKE/RKE2 clusters (provisioning, scaling, patching and upgrading) across hybrid, multi-cloud or bare-metal environments with minimal to zero downtime.
- Develop and maintain automated CI/CD pipelines and implement GitOps workflows (using tools like Gitlab, ArgoCD or Rancher Fleet) to streamline continuous application delivery.
- Monitor platform health using tools like Prometheus and Grafana, respond to system alerts and troubleshoot complex containerized workload issues.
- Enforce security policy's, including network policies, Rancher RBAC configurations and automated container image scanning.
- Proactively monitor resource utilization (CPU, memory, persistent storage) to right-size clusters, scale nodes dynamically and optimize cloud or on-prem infrastructure.
- Create and maintain technical documentation, including runbooks and architecture diagrams.
- Some work outside of normal Office hours may be required.
- Up to 100 TDY within Belgium per year.
Skill, Knowledge & Experience:
- The candidate must have a currently active NATO SECRET security clearance
- Minimum of 4 years of dedicated, hands-on experience in DevOps or Platform Engineering roles.
- Over 4 years of sustained experience designing, deploying and maintaining highly available production Kubernetes clusters, heavily utilizing the SUSE Rancher ecosystem.
- A solid track record of leading complex migrations, moving legacy virtualized applications into containerized, microservice-based architectures.
- Expertly provision, secure, and lifecycle-manage large-scale, multi-cluster Kubernetes environments using SUSE Rancher UI/API and Rancher Manager.
- Write modular, reusable code to automate infrastructure provisioning across hybrid environments using Ansible.
- Architect and maintain sophisticated, zero-downtime deployment pipelines using GitOps principles with Gitlab, ArgoCD or Rancher Fleet.
- Author/manage advanced Helm charts and manage complex stateful and stateless deployments.
- Engineer comprehensive monitoring and logging stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK) to establish SLIs/SLOs and configure automated remediation. Experience with Rancher Observability is a plus.
- Develop robust automation scripts in Python or Bash.
- Rapidly diagnose and resolve high-severity incidents across the entire stack, from kernel-level container issues to complex network routing failures.
- Comprehensive understanding of the underlying architectures of RKE, RKE2, K8S /K3s and knowing exactly when to apply each distribution.
- Knowledge of zero-trust models, Rancher RBAC, Pod Security Admissions, container scanning and enforcing governance.
- CNIs tools (Calico, Cilium, Canal) deep understanding of Software Defined Network and Container Networking, network policies and managing complex Ingress and Service Mesh (Istio) architectures.
- Expert knowledge of Container Storage Interfaces (CSI), disaster recovery planning and managing highly available storage solutions like SUSE Longhorn.
- Extensive practical experience operating distributed Kubernetes environments across a mix of bare-metal, on-premises hypervisors (vSphere, Nutanix), and public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP).
- Experience acting as a technical escalation point, guiding junior team members, and establishing DevOps best practices across development teams.
