AKS/Platform Architect

About This Opportunity

CTI Staffing is partnering with a leading airline organization to find an AKS / Platform Architect for their cloud platform engineering team based in the Dallas-Fort Worth, TX area.

This team owns the container platform strategy for a large-scale enterprise environment. They're building out multi-region Kubernetes infrastructure with a strong emphasis on automation, security, and developer self-service. This is a design-and-build role, not a maintenance role.

What You'll Do

• Architect multi-region AKS solutions built for availability and disaster recovery
  
• Build and own GitOps workflows for infrastructure and application deployment
  
• Configure ingress controllers and traffic routing for secure, scalable access
  
• Design identity and access management using Azure AD, RBAC, and pod identity
  
• Stand up monitoring, logging, and distributed tracing across the platform
  
• Build reusable platform services that improve developer productivity
  
• Partner with cross-functional teams to turn business needs into platform architecture
  
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring to platform engineers
  

Requirements

What You Bring

Must-Have:

• 5+ years of Kubernetes and container platform architecture experience
  
• Proven experience designing and deploying multi-region AKS clusters with failover and load balancing
  
• Hands-on GitOps implementation using Flux, ArgoCD, or similar
  
• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes ingress controllers and API gateway traffic management
  
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes identity and access management, including Azure AD integration, RBAC, and pod identity
  
• Experience implementing observability stacks — monitoring, logging, alerting, distributed tracing
  
• Ability to travel for onsite work as needed (up to 25% annually)
  
• Strong communication skills with cross-functional technical teams
  

Nice-to-Have:

• CKA or CKAD certification
  
• Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, or Jaeger specifically
  
• Background mentoring platform engineering teams
  
• Experience in a regulated or high-availability enterprise environment
  

Technical Environment:

• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), multi-region architecture
  
• GitOps: Flux, ArgoCD
  
• Azure AD, RBAC, pod identity
  
• Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Jaeger, Azure Monitor
  

What Success Looks Like:

• A documented, working multi-region AKS reference architecture within the first 90 days
  
• GitOps workflows in production use across at least one major application team
  
• Reduced manual deployment friction reported by platform engineering stakeholders