Principal Kubernetes Engineer

Company: Verizon
Location: Ashburn
Posted on: July 10, 2025

Job Description:

When you join Verizon You want more out of a career. A place to share your ideas freely — even if they’re daring or different. Where the true you can learn, grow, and thrive. At Verizon, we power and empower how people live, work and play by connecting them to what brings them joy. We do what we love — driving innovation, creativity, and impact in the world. Our V Team is a community of people who anticipate, lead, and believe that listening is where learning begins. In crisis and in celebration, we come together — lifting our communities and building trust in how we show up, everywhere & always. Want in? Join the V Team Life. What you’ll be doing The Principal Cloud Platform Operations Engineer is a senior position within the VCP Core Webscale team. This position is responsible for the onboarding and operational support for applications within Verizon Cloud Platform. This position will be responsible for system administration, network administration for upstream and downstream network elements supporting the 5G Core. The Principal Engineer position must excel in technical theory and documentation. The Principal Engineer will function as a subject matter expert in automation and cloud computing and will leverage those skills to drive efficiencies. In this role the candidate will be responsible for leading the implementation of feature designs and will provide feedback to engineering for solutions to improve reliability and performance. The candidate will partner with key stakeholders to ensure new features and or fixes are swiftly tested and rolled out with no negative impact to customers. The candidate will have the opportunity to envision and operationalize system and network variables to benchmark the platform and to ensure reliability and performance metrics are met. This position will provide advanced support for the Verizon Cloud Platform. Responsible for the Openshift (Kubernetes) environment, storage, and the network infrastructure. This position will require independent thinking and a creative mindset with the ability to leverage automation to eliminate manual processes and provide near real-time visibility into system health and performance. The candidate must be able to identify deficiencies and quickly develop solutions to help improve reliability and add operational efficiencies. The role will help onboard tenants to the Webscale Platform, while developing an in-depth understanding of the client applications. The candidate will need to be able to support a flexible work schedule, including overnight and weekend work as business needs dictate. The candidate will also participate in on-call rotation that provides after hours critical support to tenant applications. The candidate will function as a subject matter expert in container based cloud-computing and automation. The role also has the exciting opportunity to lead and actively participate in meetings with key stakeholders regarding the planning, lab, engineering, and operations practices alike. Mentor junior team members on design concepts, compute, storage, and networking in a Kubernetes environment. Act as a point of escalation for external support teams, providing feedback and guidance on the evolution of the platform support and maintenance. Lead failure analysis and remediation efforts. Provide concise weekly updates to management and present project status to leadership. Effectively communicate with tenants and on rare occasions external customers. What we’re looking for You’re a technical specialist with solid credentials and a remarkable ability to find, break down, and solve problems. You work effectively with a wide range of internal and external stakeholders, and you’re phenomenal at partnering with the groups you support. You constantly look for ways to make a great network design better, and you’re a natural mentor to junior engineers looking to develop their technical skills. You'll need to have: Bachelor's degree or four or more years of work experience. Six or more years of relevant work experience required, demonstrated through one or a combination of work and/or military experience, or specialized training. Leadership experience as a subject matter expert. Demonstrated Linux System Administration Skills. Experience with service mesh to manage Layer 7 networking. Automation experience with tools such as BASH, Ansible, and Python. Experience deploying, configuring, and supporting various distributions of Kubernetes. Working knowledge of the Kubernetes API Server. Knowledge of NFS and Networking fundamentals. Working knowledge of Git, Gitlab, GitHub and CICD workflows. Even better if you have one or more of the following: Demonstrable experience with SDN related concepts and protocols. Virtualization and Linux Certifications. Experience deploying, configuring, and supporting Openshift. Experience with OVN-Kubernetes. Experience with Multus CNI. Experience with Service Proxy for Kubernetes. Experience with NETApp Storage Solution. Experience with Object Storage (Swiftstack/MINIO). Working knowledge of Openstack. Effective written and verbal communication skills. If Verizon and this role sound like a fit for you, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every “even better” qualification listed above. Where you’ll be working In this hybrid role, you'll have a defined work location that includes work from home and a minimum eight assigned office days per month that will be set by your manager. Scheduled Weekly Hours 40 Equal Employment Opportunity Verizon is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to veteran status, disability or other legally protected characteristics.

Keywords: Verizon, Olney , Principal Kubernetes Engineer, IT / Software / Systems , Ashburn, Maryland