Lead Kubernetes Platform Engineer

Job Description:

Lead Kubernetes Platform Engineer

Collaborate with Innovative 3Mers Around the World

Choosing where to start and grow your career has a major impact on your professional and personal life, so it's equally important that you know that the company you choose to work at, and its leaders, will support and guide you. With a diversity of people, global locations, technologies, and products, 3M is a place where you can collaborate with other curious, creative 3Mers.

This position provides an opportunity to transition from other private, public, government, or military experience to a 3M career.

The Impact You'll Make in this Role

When you join the Platform Engineering, Developer Services team, you become a crucial part of 3M's digital transformation. You will substantially contribute to the delivery of applications and services that benefit 3M customers worldwide. You will develop, operate, and evolve the enterprise Kubernetes platform that enables engineering teams to securely build, deploy, and manage cloud-native applications at scale.

As a Kubernetes Platform Engineer and Technical Lead in Developer Services, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with some of the most innovative and diverse people from around the world.

Leadership

• Technical owner of 3M’s Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA HCP) platform, accountable for how it is architected, operated, secured, and evolved.
• Lead the enterprise consolidation of 3M’s Kubernetes estate onto ROSA HCP, including migration strategy, sequencing, and retirement of legacy platforms.
• Define the platform and practices that make ROSA HCP the easiest, most cost effective, most resilient, and best supported path for containerized applications.

Platform Architecture

• Design, implement, and maintain enterprise architecture and platform standards.
• Define standards for high availability, multi-cluster operations, scalability, resiliency, and disaster recovery.
• Establish approved patterns for containerization, networking, ingress, observability, security, and platform automation.

Platform Engineering & Operations

• Lead the design and engineering of core platform services including ingress, service mesh, observability, secrets management, container registries, and policy enforcement.
• Own the GitOps and Infrastructure as Code approach for the platform, automating cluster provisioning, configuration, and lifecycle management so that platform changes are versioned, reviewable, and repeatable.
• Define and deliver self-service capabilities that improve developer productivity while meeting enterprise governance, security, and compliance requirements.
• Lead day-to-day operations of the platform, including upgrade and patching cadence, capacity planning, incident response, and on-call practices for the platform team.
• Own platform reliability, performance, and cost, setting service levels and driving continuous improvement against them.

Technical Mentorship

• Promote engineering excellence through technical leadership, knowledge sharing, and enterprise standards of development.
• Coach engineers, architects, and technical leads on Kubernetes best practices, cloud-native architectures, platform engineering principles, and container security.
• Guide application teams through modernization and migration conversations.

Your Skills and Expertise

To set you up for success in this role from day one, 3M requires (at a minimum) the following qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity, Information Technology, or technology field (completed and verified prior to start) 

OR

• High School diploma (completed and verified prior to start) and Six (6) years of hands-on experience (completed and verified prior to start)

AND

• Five (5) years of experience designing, deploying, or operating Kubernetes platforms in a private, public, government, or military environment.
• Five (5) years of experience with cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or related disciplines.

Additional qualifications that could help you succeed even further in this role include:

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).
• Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS).
• Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD).
• AWS Solutions Architect, AWS DevOps Engineer, Azure, or other cloud certifications.
• Red Hat OpenShift and ROSA administration experience.
• Experience implementing platform engineering products and developer self-service platforms.
• Strong Information Security background, certifications, or formal training.
• Experience supporting large-scale, globally distributed Kubernetes environments.
• Master's degree in computer science, Engineering, Information Technology, or related discipline.
• Experience with WebSphere/JBOSS and Apache
• Comfortable being in an on-call rotation for one week/month
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with a collaborative, customer-focused mindset.
• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes architecture, control-plane components, networking, security, and workload management.
• Strong automation and scripting experience using Git, APIs/CLI, Python, Bash, and Ansible
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), ideally AWS CloudFormation or CDK.
• Experience implementing CI/CD and GitOps solutions using GitHub Actions, Argo CD or similar technologies at scale.
• Experience with container technologies including Docker, Helm, Kubernetes Operators, and container registries.
• Strong understanding of observability platforms including Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Dynatrace, Elastic, or similar solutions.
• Experience designing and implementing Kubernetes security controls including RBAC, workload identity, admission controllers, network policies, secrets management, and compliance monitoring.
• Working knowledge of cloud networking, DNS, load balancing, service mesh technologies, and API management solutions.

Work Location

• Maplewood, MN

Travel: May include up to 5% domestic and international travel.

Must be legally authorized to work in the country of employment without sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g., H-1B status).

Supporting Your Well-being

3M offers many programs to help you live your best life – both physically and financially. To ensure competitive pay and benefits, 3M regularly benchmarks with other companies that are comparable in size and scope.

Chat with Max

For assistance with searching through our current job openings or for more information about all things 3M, visit Max, our virtual recruiting assistant on 3M.com/careers.

Please note: your application may not be considered if you do not provide your education and work history, either by: 1) uploading a resume, or 2) entering the information into the application fields directly.

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