Platform Engineer 

Start Date: 03/08/2026

End Date: 31/12/2027

Location: Brussels (2 days onsite per week)

Work Regime: Full-time

Role Summary:

The Platform Engineer is responsible for the reliable, secure, and stable operation of a high-availability cloud platform, built on Kubernetes and composed of multiple in-house platform components. The role focuses on platform lifecycle management, day-2 operations, incident response, and operational excellence, ensuring that customer-facing Web UIs and APIs remain available, performant, and secure 24/7. The Platform Engineer acts as a technical custodian of the platform, providing a stable foundation on which service teams can safely deploy and operate their workloads.

Primary Objectives:

• Maintain platform availability and reliability in accordance with SLOs/SLAs.
• Ensure operational readiness of all environments (DEV / TEST / ACC / PROD).
• Provide 24/7 operational coverage for critical platform services (via on-call).
• Ensure the platform is observable, secure, well-controlled, and documented.
• Execute platform changes, upgrades, and maintenance in a predictable and low-risk manner.

Key Responsibilities:

Kubernetes & Runtime Operations

• Operate Kubernetes primitives and platform add-ons: Ingress controllers, service discovery, workload identity.
• Troubleshoot Kubernetes-related failures: Pod lifecycle issues, networking problems, resource starvation.
• Controlled rollouts with rollback plans.

Reliability & 24/7 Incident Response

• Participate in the 24/7 on-call rotation for critical services (incident responder).
• Lead or contribute to incident triage and mitigation, Root Cause Analysis (RCA), and post-incident action tracking and follow-up.
• Maintain and improve runbooks and operational procedures.

Observability & Monitoring

• Operate and use the open-source observability platform.
• Ensure effective observability across the platform: Metrics, logs, and distributed traces.
• Actionable alerts and reduced false positives.
• Support incident analysis through correlation and telemetry inspection.

Change, Release & Maintenance Management

• Plan and execute platform changes.
• Follow structured change management practices.
• Stakeholder communication.
• Ensure platform changes are documented and auditable.

Security & Compliance (Operational Focus)

• Operate platform security controls: RBAC, network boundaries, secret management.
• Apply security updates and patches to platform components.
• Support vulnerability remediation efforts.
• Provide operational evidence for audits and security reviews.

Automation & Operational Improvement

• Automate repetitive operational tasks where appropriate.
• Reduce operational risk through standardization and documented procedures.
• Platform as Code approach (GitOps).

Requirements:

Technical Skills

• Kubernetes (Deep Production Expertise)
• Multi-cluster architecture & lifecycle management
• RBAC & least-privilege design
• Network policies & traffic segmentation
• Stateful workloads & storage strategy (CSI, PV/PVC)
• Autoscaling (HPA/VPA) & resource tuning
• Pod Security Standards
• Admission controllers
• Performance & reliability troubleshooting
• Cluster-level debugging (networking, DNS, scheduling, OOM, crash loops)

GitOps & Continuous Delivery

• ArgoCD (advanced usage)
• App-of-Apps pattern
• Sync waves & hooks
• Drift detection & reconciliation
• Multi-environment promotion workflows
• Git-based deployment strategy with version management
• Declarative platform design with PR-driven changes
• YAML-based CI/CD pipelines with Harness.io
• Secure secret handling in CI/CD (with HashiCorp)

Packaging & Configuration

• Helm (advanced chart authoring)
• Reusable library charts
• OCI-based registries
• Values layering strategy
• Kustomize overlays for multi-environment isolation and strategic patches

Container & Artifact Management

• Docker (secure multi-stage builds, optimization)
• Harbor (RBAC, replication, vulnerability scanning)
• JFrog Artifactory (Docker & Helm registry management)
• Artifact versioning & promotion strategy

Secrets & Security

• HashiCorp Vault for dynamic secrets with CSI integration
• Image vulnerability scanning integration
• Supply chain security awareness
• TLS & certificate lifecycle management
• RBAC governance

Observability & Reliability

• OpenTelemetry (metrics, logs, traces)
• Prometheus or VictoriaMetrics (recording rules, HA setup)
• Loki (log aggregation & LogQL)
• Tempo (distributed tracing)
• Grafana (advanced dashboards & alerting)
• SLI/SLO design & error budget thinking
• Alert noise reduction strategy

Networking (Advanced)

• TCP/IP & DNS fundamentals
• TLS & mTLS concepts
• Kubernetes Services, Ingress & Reverse Proxy concepts
• East-west vs north-south traffic
• API routing & traffic management
• Network Policies implementation

Automation

• Advanced Bash scripting
• Infrastructure automation mindset

Nice to Have

• Kong API Gateway (api routing, plugins, authentication, rate limiting)
• Redis (operational knowledge: deployment, persistence, clustering, backups)
• PostgreSQL (migrations, backups, HA basics, Kubernetes deployment patterns)
• MongoDB (replica sets, backups, Kubernetes deployment patterns)
• Kargo on top of ArgoCD for release orchestration

Operational Skills

• Proven experience in production operations or platform support roles
• Ability to work calmly and methodically under pressure
• Strong troubleshooting skills across distributed systems
• Clear written and verbal communication during incidents and changes
• Flexibility to balance daily operations with long-term changes

Ways of Working

• Structured, risk-aware, and detail-oriented
• Comfortable with operational responsibility and accountability
• Strong collaboration with Development teams, Security teams, Product teams
• Documentation-first mindset for operational knowledge

Positioning vs Other Roles:

• Not a pure SRE role: focus is stability and operations, not reliability engineering.
• Not a pure DevOps engineer embedded in product teams.
• The role is the operational owner of the platform, in all environments, ensuring they run safely and predictably.