Lead DevOps Engineer · Kubernetes & GitOps
Own the platform every engagement ships onto: Kubernetes, containers, and Argo CD-driven GitOps, from cluster design through production on-call.
What this seat actually is.
You are the person the platform belongs to. Client engagements land on clusters you designed, deploy through pipelines you built, and page you when they misbehave. Nobody hands you a runbook to follow — you write the one everyone else follows.
This is a lead role in scope, not in headcount. You set the platform standard across pods, review the infrastructure others write, and stay hands-on in the terminal every week. We do not have a management ladder to climb, and this is not a step onto one.
Hybrid out of the UAE: in the room with the team and with clients when it matters, at home when the work is deep. We do not count days at a desk.
What you own.
- ·Design and operate multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters that carry client workloads in production — networking, ingress, autoscaling, resource governance, and the failure modes of each.
- ·Own the GitOps layer end to end: Argo CD applications, app-of-apps and ApplicationSet patterns, sync waves, drift detection, and rollbacks that are boring because they were rehearsed.
- ·Build and maintain the container supply chain — base images, multi-stage builds, registries, scanning, signing, and the reproducibility guarantees that make an image trustworthy.
- ·Write infrastructure as code that a second engineer can read and change safely. No click-ops, no snowflake environments, no state that only lives in one head.
- ·Run zero-downtime cutovers for migrations — plan, dry run, execute, and hold the rollback lever throughout.
- ·Own observability as a design input rather than an afterthought: metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, and alerts that fire on symptoms a human can act on.
- ·Harden the platform for regulated GCC clients — data residency, in-region hosting, network isolation, secret handling, and access you can produce an audit trail for.
- ·Carry the platform pager on a rotation, write the post-incident review, and land the fix that stops the repeat.
- ·Review the infrastructure work of other engineers, and mentor by written architecture rather than by meeting.
Every line here is real.
- ·Senior-level experience operating production infrastructure end to end
- ·Deep Kubernetes: not just kubectl, but scheduling, networking, RBAC, and how clusters actually fail
- ·Docker fluency — image design, layering, size and build-time discipline, registry hygiene
- ·Argo CD in production: app-of-apps, sync policies, drift and rollback under pressure
- ·GitOps as a working model, not a slide — declared state in Git as the only path to production
- ·Infrastructure as code fluency (Terraform or equivalent) with real module and state discipline
- ·CI/CD ownership: pipelines you designed, not pipelines you inherited and tolerated
- ·Cloud depth on at least one major provider, with strong networking and IAM instincts
- ·Linux and networking fundamentals you can reason from when the dashboards lie
- ·On-call temperament — calm, methodical, and honest in a post-mortem
- ·Written English strong enough to carry an architecture decision without a meeting
- ·Based in the UAE, or ready to relocate, for a hybrid working pattern
- ·Service mesh, progressive delivery, or policy-as-code in anger (Istio, Argo Rollouts, OPA / Kyverno)
- ·Platform work behind AI or GPU workloads — inference services, queues, batch, autoscaling on odd signals
- ·FinOps instinct: you know what the cluster costs and where the waste is
- ·Security posture work — supply-chain hardening, SBOMs, image signing
- ·Experience with GCC regulatory contexts (DIFC, ADGM, national data-residency requirements)
- ·Arabic in addition to English
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- WhyOne paragraph: why this role, and something you shipped end to end.
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