Golang / Kubernetes Platform Tech Lead
Posted 4 days ago by Vallum Associates
Negotiable
Inside
Hybrid
Birmingham, England, United Kingdom
Summary: The Golang / Kubernetes Platform Tech Lead role is a contract position based in Birmingham, UK, focusing on building and managing a GKE Kubernetes Platform. The candidate will leverage their expertise in GoLang and Kubernetes to support technical decision-making and mentor team members. This position requires a blend of technical skills, operational insight, and strategic thinking within an agile environment. The role also involves ensuring compliance with security controls and supporting continuous integration and delivery processes.
Key Responsibilities:
- Build and manage the Client GKE Kubernetes Platform for application teams.
- Mentor and guide support engineers, representing the platform through talks and discussions.
- Engineer solutions using coding, automation, and Infrastructure as Code methods.
- Ensure compliance with security controls and operational risk standards.
- Provide impact assessments for changes proposed on the HSBC GCP core platform.
- Support continuous integration, delivery, and testing activities.
- Update support and operational documentation as required.
- Fault find and support Applications teams.
- Provide out of business hours support on a rotational on-call basis.
Key Skills:
- Demonstrable Kubernetes and Cloud Native experience.
- Automation scripting skills using Terraform, Python, etc.
- Experience with Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and testing tools.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes resource configuration tooling (Helm, Kustomize, kpt).
- Experience working within an Agile environment.
- Programming experience in Python or Go.
- Ability to quickly acquire new skills and tools.
- Experience in stakeholder management and work estimation.
- GCP Certifications and Kubernetes certifications (CKAS / CKA) are a plus.
- Experience in regulated industries, such as Financial Services.
Salary (Rate): undetermined
City: Birmingham
Country: United Kingdom
Working Arrangements: hybrid
IR35 Status: inside IR35
Seniority Level: undetermined
Industry: IT
The Role: Golang / Kubernetes Platform Tech Lead
Location: Sheffield, Leeds or Birmingham, UK
Position Type: Contract Inside IR35
Remote work option Available: Hybrid – 3 Days Onsite
Job Description:
The candidate should have good technical knowledge of GoLang (our environment is 80% written in GoLang) and a deep understanding of the Kubernetes ecosystem. We are looking for a strong technical individual who can support the team on Kubernetes and GoLang, particularly during PR reviews and technical decision-making. This role goes beyond coding – it requires someone who can combine deep technical expertise with operational insight and strategic thinking. The Kubernetes Platform Tech Lead will work within an agile team of Engineers and Operations personnel building a highly resilient, scalable, performant and developer friendly GKE Kubernetes Platform in an automated and efficient manner. The Platform Engineer will work alongside the Application DevOps teams and cross-functional IT teams. The Lead will be required to use their initiative to innovate to achieve maximum performance and be prepared to investigate and use new products/services offered by GCP and the Cloud Native community.
What you’ll do
- Build and manage the Client GKE Kubernetes Platform to easily let application teams deploy to Kubernetes.
- Mentor and guide support engineers, represent the platform technically through talks, blog posts and discussions.
- Engineer solutions on Client GKE Kubernetes Platform using Coding, Automation and Infrastructure as Code methods (e.g. Python, Tekton, Flux, Helm, Terraform, …).
- Manage a fleet of GKE clusters from a centrally provided solution.
- Ensure compliance with centrally defined security controls and with operational risk standards (E.g. Network, Firewall, OS, Logging, Monitoring, Availability, Resiliency and Containers).
- Ensure good Change management practice is implemented as specified by central standards.
- Provide impact assessments where requested for changes proposed on HSBC GCP core platform.
- Build and support continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD) and continuous testing activities.
- Engineering activities to implement patches for VMs and containers provided centrally.
- Support non-functional testing.
- Update support and operational documentation as required.
- Fault find and support Applications teams.
- On a rotational on call basis provide out of business hours support as part of our 24 x 7 coverage.
What you need to have to succeed in this role
- Demonstrable Kubernetes and Cloud Native experience – building, configuring and extending Kubernetes platforms.
- Automation scripting (using scripting languages such as Terraform, Python etc.).
- Experience of working with Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD) and continuous testing tools.
- Experience of working with Kubernetes resource configuration tooling (Helm, Kustomize, kpt).
- Experience working within an Agile environment.
- Programming experience in one or more of the following languages: Python or Go.
- the candidate should have good technical knowledge of GoLang (our environment is 80% written in GoLang) and a deep understanding of the Kubernetes ecosystem.
- Ability to quickly acquire new skills and tools.
- Help lead the team through technical challenges.
- Help the platform owner with work estimation and stakeholder management.
- Be the technical front of the Managed Kubernetes Platform, supporting our customer queries.
- Be involved in strategic developments for the platform.
- Help in our journey to make the platform multi cloud.
Nice to have
- GCP Certifications - ideally professional.
- CKAS / CKA Certifications.
- Kubernetes native Continuous Delivery (FluxCD, ArgoCD).
- Implementing workload observability using logging and monitoring tools (Prometheus, Grafana, GCP Monitoring).
- Experience operating in highly regulated industry, e.g. Financial Services.