Cloud Platform Engineer - Kubernetes & NW Specialist

Job Description

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Platform Engineer to manage and enhance our end-to-end application delivery platform, from CloudFront to the underlying EKS clusters.  Moving beyond standard maintenance, this role combines production infrastructure ownership with software engineering. You will build and scale robust in-house platform tools, develop custom Kubernetes controllers, and automate complex workflows safely.  

The ideal candidate will have a strong foundation across cloud infrastructure, networking, Kubernetes, and service mesh technologies, with deep expertise in at least one of these areas. The candidate will also have production experience in Python or Go and the versatility to become productive in the other. We particularly value engineers who can quickly understand unfamiliar systems, capable of using AI-assisted development effectively while remaining accountable for production stability, code maintainability, and operational safety.

In this role, you will play a pivotal part in raising our engineering velocity and defining the reliability standards of our platform.

Main Responsibilities

• Develop, maintain, and automate in-house tools, Kubernetes manifest generator engine and scripts using programming languages like Python or Go to improve platform operations and efficiency.
• Perform upgrades and patching of EKS clusters and associated components, and improve the process through safe, repeatable automation.
• Manage and optimize related components such as Karpenter (cluster autoscaling) and Argo CD (GitOps continuous delivery).
• Implement and manage service mesh solutions (e.g., Istio, Linkerd) for enhanced traffic management, security, and observability.
• Participate in an on-call rotation to provide 24/7 support for critical platform issues and monitor the platform for potential issues and implement preventative measures.
• Configure and manage CloudFront distributions, WAF web ACLs for efficient & secure content delivery & traffic management.
• Develop and maintain documentation for platform architecture, processes, and troubleshooting guides.

Tech Stack

• AWS: VPC, EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, CloudFront, WAF, R53, RDS, ECR, ElastiCache, DynamoDB, S3, CloudWatch, Cognito, SQS, KMS, Secrets Manager, VPC Lattice, IAM.
• IAC: Terraform, Atlantis.
• CICD: Jenkins, Argo CD, Argo Rollouts, Argo Workflows, GitHub Actions.
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Quickwit.
• Platform Tools: Istio, Karpenter, Kyverno, KEDA, Artifactory, AWS Load Balancer Controller, ingress controller, cert-manager.

Required Qualifications

• Demonstrable experience with advanced software engineering practices, including unit/integration testing.
• Deep understanding of Kubernetes internals and the controller-runtime framework, experience developing, testing, and maintaining custom controllers/operators and CustomResourceDefinitions.
• Proven experience as a Platform Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), or similar role with a focus on end-to-end platform ownership.
• Strong understanding and practical experience with Karpenter, Argo CD, Terraform..
• Strong networking fundamentals and the ability to troubleshoot an end-to-end request path across CloudFront, WAF, load balancers, Kubernetes networking, service mesh, and workloads.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience working with service mesh technologies (preferably Istio) in a production environment.
• Demonstrable experience with SSL/TLS certificate management.
• Experience with multi-cluster Kubernetes architectures.
• Experience building AZ isolated, DR architectures.

PayPay 5 senses

• Please refer PayPay 5 senses to learn what we value at work.

Working Conditions 

Employment Status

• Full Time

Office Location

• Hybrid Workstyle
  ※ You will be expected to work in the office, in alignment with organizational guidelines and team objectives.
• LIFE in JAPAN FACTBOOK

Work Hours

• Super Flex Time (No Core Time)
• In principle, 9:00am-5:45pm + 1h break (actual working hours: 7h45m + 1h break)

Holidays

• Every Sat/Sun/National holidays (In Japan)/New Year's break/Company-designated Special days

Paid leave

• Annual leave (up to 14 days in the first year, granted proportionally according to the month of employment. Can be used from the date of hire)
• Personal leave (5 days each year, granted proportionally according to the month of employment）
  ＊PayPay's own special paid leave system, which can be used to attend to illnesses, injuries, hospital visits, etc., of the employee, family members, pets, etc.

Salary

• Annual salary paid in 12 installments (monthly)
• Based on skills, experience, and abilities
• Reviewed once a year
• Late overtime allowance
  ＊Payroll payment can be changed to digital salary payment “PayPay Paycheck” for an amount set by you

Benefits

• Social Insurance (health insurance, employee pension, employment insurance and compensation insurance)
• 401K
• Translation/Interpretation support
• VISA sponsor + Relocation support