Senior Engineer (Kubernetes Orchestrator)

Spektrum supports apex purchasers (NATO, UN, EU, and National Government and Defence) and their Tier 1 supplier ecosystem with a wide range of specialist services. We provide our clients with professional services, specialised aerospace and defence sales, delivery, and operational subject matter expertise. We are looking for personnel to join our team and support key client projects.

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Who we are supporting 

The NATO Communication and Information Agency (NCIA) is responsible for providing secure and effective communications and information technology (IT) services to NATO's member countries and its partners. The agency was established in 2012 and is headquartered in Brussels, Belgium.

The NCIA provides a wide range of services, including:

• Cyber Security: The NCIA provides advanced cybersecurity solutions to protect NATO's communication networks and information systems against cyber threats.
• Command and Control Systems: The NCIA develops and maintains the systems used by NATO's military commanders to plan and execute operations.
• Satellite Communications: The NCIA provides satellite communications services to enable secure and reliable communications between NATO forces.
• Electronic Warfare: The NCIA provides electronic warfare services to support NATO's mission to detect, deny, and defeat threats to its communication networks.
• Information Management: The NCIA manages NATO's information technology infrastructure, including its databases, applications, and servers.

Overall, the NCIA plays a critical role in ensuring the security and effectiveness of NATO's communication and information technology capabilities.

The program

Assistance and Advisory Service (AAS)

The NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCI Agency) is NATO’s principal C3 capability deliverer and CIS service provider. It provides, maintains and defends the NATO enterprise-wide information technology infrastructure to enable Allies to consult together under Article IV, and, when required, stand together in the face of attack under Article V.

To provide these critical services, in the modern evolving dynamic environment the NCI Agency needs to build and maintain high performance-engaged workforce. The NCI Agency workforce strategically consists of three major categorise's: NATO International Civilians (NIC)'s, Military (Mil), and Interim Workforce Consultants (IWC)'s. The IWCs are a critical part of the overall NCI Agency workforce and make up approximately 15 percent of the total workforce.

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Role ID – C004843

Role Duties and Responsibilities

• 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.

Essential Skills, Experience and Certifications

• 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 deploymentpipelines 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.

Working Location

• Brane-l’Alleud, Belgium

Working Policy

• Onsite

Travel

• Some travel to other NATO sites may be required

Security Clearance

• Valid National or NATO Secret personal security clearance