Senior Data Platform Engineer — Kafka & PostgreSQL

Mirantis, an IREN company, is the Kubernetes-native AI infrastructure company, enabling organizations to build and operate scalable, secure, and sovereign infrastructure for modern AI, machine learning, and data-intensive applications. By combining open source innovation with deep expertise in Kubernetes orchestration, Mirantis empowers platform engineering teams to deliver composable, production-ready developer platforms across any environment—on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, or in sovereign data centers.

As enterprises navigate the growing complexity of AI-driven workloads, Mirantis delivers the automation, GPU orchestration, and policy-driven control needed to manage infrastructure with confidence and agility. Committed to open standards and freedom from lock-in, Mirantis ensures that customers retain full control of their infrastructure strategy.

https://www.mirantis.com/ We are looking for a Senior Data Platform Engineer to run the PostgreSQL and Apache Kafka platform behind k0rdent-ai — our multi-tenant control plane for enterprise GPU infrastructure. Every cluster provisioned, every GPU-hour consumed, and every tenant action is recorded on this platform, so it must be reliable, secure, and recoverable.

This is a hands-on DevOps / SRE role for stateful systems. You will deploy and operate PostgreSQL (Cloud. NativePG) and Kafka (Strimzi) on Kubernetes using operators, Helm, and Git. Ops — across cloud and bare-metal clusters, in a global control plane and multiple regions. You will own automation, upgrades, observability, backups, and disaster recovery, and give product teams self-service access to databases and topics through code.

Main Responsibilities Run PostgreSQL and Kafka on Kubernetes: Deploy, upgrade, scale, and operate Cloud. NativePG and Strimzi clusters with Helm charts and operator custom resources, across cloud and bare-metal Kubernetes. Git. Ops & Infrastructure as Code: Manage everything declaratively with Argo CD (or Flux), Helm, and Terraform; build CI/CD pipelines for database and Kafka changes, schema migrations, and operator upgrades.

High Availability & Disaster Recovery: Design and operate high availability within each region and cross-region disaster recovery — PostgreSQL replica clusters, backups and point-in-time recovery, Kafka Mirror. Maker 2 — with defined RPO/RTO targets and regular failover drills. Self-Service Platform: Give product teams self-service provisioning of databases, users, topics, and ACLs through code, with secure defaults and guardrails.

Observability & Operations: Build monitoring and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, Open. Telemetry) for replication lag, backups, consumer lag, and capacity; participate in on-call and lead incident reviews. Security & Multi-Tenancy: Implement TLS/mTLS, secrets management (Vault/Open. Bao), network policies, Kafka ACLs, and per-tenant isolation; integrate database and Kafka access with our identity platform (Keycloak / OIDC).

Data Movement & CDC: Operate the outbox and change-data-capture pipelines (Debezium, Kafka Connect) that keep databases and event streams consistent between the global control plane and regions. Automation & Tooling: Write automation and small services in Go or Python to remove manual work, and partner with application teams on schema standards and performance troubleshooting.

Must Have Experience: 8+ years in DevOps, SRE, platform, or infrastructure engineering, including 3+ years running stateful systems (databases or message streaming) in production. Kubernetes: Strong hands-on Kubernetes operations — Stateful. Sets, persistent volumes and storage classes, pod disruption budgets, scheduling and affinity, network policies, and cluster upgrades — on cloud and/or bare-metal clusters.

Operators & Helm: Production experience running PostgreSQL and/or Kafka through Kubernetes operators (Cloud. NativePG, Zalando, or Crunchy PGO; Strimzi, Confluent for Kubernetes, or similar), and authoring and maintaining Helm charts. Depth with one operator matters more than the specific product. Git. Ops & IaC: Day-to-day use of Argo CD or Flux, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar) in a declarative, review-driven workflow.

PostgreSQL Operations: Practical PostgreSQL administration — replication and failover, backup and point-in-time recovery, connection pooling (Pg. Bouncer), version upgrades, and performance troubleshooting. Kafka Operations: Running Kafka in production — brokers, topics and partitions, replication, consumer groups, monitoring, and capacity planning.

Reliability & DR: Designing and testing high availability and disaster recovery for stateful systems, with defined RPO/RTO. Automation: Strong scripting and programming in Go (preferred) or Python, plus Bash.

Nice to Have

Cross-region replication (Cloud. NativePG replica clusters, Kafka Mirror. Maker 2) and global/regional multi-site architectures. Debezium, Kafka Connect, and transactional outbox / CDC patterns. Identity integration for data platforms (Keycloak, OIDC, LDAP/Active Directory). Observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Open.

Telemetry, Victoria. Metrics). Secrets and security tooling (Vault/Open. Bao, cert-manager, mTLS). Bare-metal infrastructure, Ceph or object storage, or GPU/AI infrastructure. Contributions to Cloud. NativePG, Strimzi, or related open-source projects. Experience in SOC 2 or ISO 27001 environments.

Education and Experience

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. What does Mirantis offer you? Work with an established Silicon Valley leader in the cloud infrastructure industry; Work with exceptionally passionate, talented and engaging colleagues, helping Fortune 500 and Global 2000 customers implement next-generation cloud technologies; Be a part of cutting-edge, open-source innovation; Thrive in the high-energy environment of a young company where openness, collaboration, risk-taking, and continuous growth are valued; Professional development and training; Attend conferences and working groups; Company outings, happy hours, hackathons, and tech talks; Receive a competitive compensation package with a strong benefits plan.

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