Kubernetes Engineer Job Description Template 2026

Last updated: September 13, 2026

By Devin Hornick, Co-Founder and Partner, KORE1

A Kubernetes engineer job description should name the Kubernetes version and managed service you run, say how far behind upstream you are, state whether the Ingress NGINX migration is part of the job, and post a pay band. For a senior hire in 2026, that band runs about $165,000 to $205,000 base. The version and ingress lines are the new ones. A year ago you could leave them out and nobody would have noticed.

A platform engineer I’d been talking with since spring dropped out of a search in July over one line in the posting. “Maintain and enhance our NGINX ingress layer.”

She read it twice. Then she called me, which candidates almost never do over a bullet point. The company, a freight-audit software firm in Tustin, was still running the community ingress-nginx controller four months after the project stopped shipping security patches, and the posting wanted someone to keep it running. Not replace it. Keep it. “So either nobody there has noticed,” she said, “or somebody noticed and wants a babysitter. Which is worse?” I had no good answer.

Turned out nobody had noticed. The bullet had come from a 2023 req nobody had reopened since, and the director who owned the platform had spent the spring on a data center exit and simply missed the announcement. We rewrote the line to “Move our 64 Ingress resources from ingress-nginx to Gateway API before year end, and pick the controller.” By then she’d accepted somewhere else. The engineer they did hire brought up the migration in her very first call, before salary, before remote work, before anything.

Where I sit, so you can weigh all this. I co-founded KORE1 in 2005, and our Kubernetes engineer staffing team, one desk inside our broader IT staffing practice, is paid only when a client hires a candidate we brought them. That’s the bias. Nothing on this page requires us. Most of the fixes below take an afternoon and one conversation with whoever holds the cluster admin credentials.

One boundary before we start. This page assumes you already know what kind of Kubernetes person you’re after, and if you don’t, our Kubernetes hiring guide sorts cluster operators from application-side engineers and SREs first. If the seat is mostly writing controllers and operators in Go, the Go developer job description handles it better. If it’s the developer portal and golden paths sitting on top of the cluster, start from the platform engineer job description template. Everything below is for the person who owns the clusters themselves.

Owning the Thing Everyone Deploys Onto

A Kubernetes engineer builds and operates the clusters a company’s software is deployed to, usually on a managed service such as EKS, GKE, or AKS, and keeps them upgraded and secure. The role spans cluster networking and ingress, access control, autoscaling, observability, cost, and the incident response when any of those break.

That’s the definition. The version I’d give a CFO is shorter. Every product team in the building deploys onto something, and this person answers for the something.

So the posting matters more here than it does for most engineering roles. An application developer can survive a vague req. The code tells them what they’re working on inside a week, more or less. A cluster doesn’t. Nobody finds out what’s wrong with one until it’s theirs, and senior platform people have been burned by that at least once, which is why the ones I talk to read a Kubernetes posting the way you’d read the seller’s disclosures on a house you’re about to buy, slowly, twice, and mostly for what’s missing.

Kubernetes 1.37 Shipped in August. Where Are Your Clusters?

Upstream Kubernetes keeps three minor releases alive at a time. Right now that’s 1.37, which came out on August 26, plus 1.36 and 1.35, and according to the Kubernetes releases page each minor gets roughly a year of patches before it falls off the list. A new one lands about every four months. The treadmill doesn’t stop.

Managed services stretch that window, for a price. On EKS a version gets 14 months of standard support and then 12 months of extended support, and AWS’s EKS pricing page lists extended support at $0.60 per cluster hour against $0.10 for standard. Six times the control plane bill. When extended support runs out, Amazon’s version lifecycle documentation says the control plane gets upgraded automatically, with no advance notice, while managed node groups and self-managed nodes stay exactly where they were. Picture that for a second. The control plane moved, the nodes didn’t, and nobody on your team chose either.

A genomics company in San Diego came to us in May for a senior platform hire. Their posting said “Kubernetes experience, EKS preferred.” Their actual estate was eleven EKS clusters, seven on 1.31 and four on 1.32, every one of them in extended support. At fifty cents an hour over the standard rate, that’s a little over $4,000 a month for the privilege of standing still, and 1.31’s extended support ends November 26, after which Amazon starts upgrading those seven control planes whether anyone is ready or not. EKS moves one minor version at a time. Four hops for the oldest clusters. Oh, and they were aiming for 1.35, where the kubelet refuses to start on a cgroup v1 node by default under the enhancement that removes cgroup v1 support, so a couple of older node images had to go too. The new hire’s first two quarters were that upgrade. The posting mentioned none of it.

We rewrote the top of the req. “Eleven EKS clusters on 1.31 and 1.32, currently in extended support. You’ll lead the path to 1.35 over your first two quarters, node images included.” Fewer applicants. Better ones. Two of the three finalists had already run a multi-hop EKS upgrade somewhere else, and in the first round they asked pointed questions about add-on compatibility. I’ve come to treat that as the best early sign a search can give you.

GKE and AKS keep separate calendars, with their own release channels and their own extended-support terms, so check yours instead of borrowing Amazon’s dates. A senior candidate will check them either way. Most look up your version before deciding whether to reply at all.

Ingress NGINX Stopped Getting Patches in March

This is the line I’d fix first. It’s also the one I see missing most.

In November 2025, Kubernetes SIG Network and the Security Response Committee announced the retirement of Ingress NGINX, the community controller that a huge number of clusters had used as their front door for years. Best-effort maintenance ran until March 2026. A January statement from the Kubernetes Steering and Security Response Committees spelled out what that means. No more releases. Nothing for bugs, and nothing for security holes either, which is the part that should worry you. The same statement cited Datadog research putting reliance on the controller at about half of all cloud native environments. Half.

Existing installs keep working, and that’s the trap. Nothing breaks on the day support ends. It breaks the next time a vulnerability turns up in an internet-facing controller nobody will ever patch again, and ingress controllers have history here, since CVE-2025-1974 in ingress-nginx was a critical, cluster-takeover-grade flaw disclosed just eight months before the retirement was announced.

One naming trap before you edit anything. The retired project is the community controller, usually written ingress-nginx. F5 maintains a separate product called NGINX Ingress Controller, and it wasn’t part of the retirement. Hiring managers mix the two up all the time. Candidates don’t. If your bullet says “NGINX ingress,” a platform engineer can’t tell which one you run, and plenty of them will assume the worse of the two.

Most teams are moving to Gateway API, with a controller from Envoy Gateway, Istio, Cilium, NGINX Gateway Fabric, or their cloud provider. The Kubernetes project shipped Ingress2Gateway 1.0 on March 20, and it translates more than 30 common Ingress NGINX annotations into Gateway API resources. Useful. Also not the whole job. The annotations it can’t translate, the configuration snippets somebody pasted in during an outage in 2022 and never wrote down, are where a migration actually spends its weeks.

So write one of these, and mean it.

• “We run ingress-nginx on [N] clusters with about [N] Ingress resources, and moving them to Gateway API on [controller] is the first major project in this role.”
• Already done? Brag a little. “We finished our move to Gateway API in [month], and you’ll own the [Envoy Gateway / Cilium] setup from here.” That line pulls in people who’d rather run a clean platform than rescue a messy one, and there are more of them than you’d guess.
• “Our ingress runs through [AWS Load Balancer Controller / GKE Gateway / Application Gateway for Containers], and we don’t use ingress-nginx anywhere.”

That last one is short. It answers the question before anyone has to ask.

The Rest of the Platform, Named Out Loud

After the version and the ingress, name the pieces a candidate would otherwise have to guess at. Managed service, and whether you use EKS Auto Mode, GKE Autopilot, or node groups you manage yourself. Argo CD or Flux for delivery. Terraform or OpenTofu for the infrastructure. The CNI, since Cilium, Calico, and the AWS VPC CNI make for genuinely different days. Kyverno or OPA Gatekeeper for policy, and External Secrets Operator, Vault, or your cloud’s secret manager for credentials. Six nouns, maybe eight. That’s the whole section.

Then take out the lines that date the posting, because a platform engineer spots them faster than anything else on the page.

“Docker experience” listed as the runtime requirement is the most common. Kubernetes removed dockershim in version 1.24, back in May 2022, and the project’s dockershim FAQ explains what replaced it. Building images with Docker is still fine to mention. Running clusters on it isn’t a thing.

PodSecurityPolicy shows up in security sections that were copied from somewhere old. The Kubernetes documentation notes it was removed in 1.25, and its replacement is Pod Security Admission, which most teams pair with Kyverno or Gatekeeper. I read a posting from an Ontario logistics company this spring that asked for PodSecurityPolicy and Pod Security Admission in consecutive bullets. Two generations of the same idea, stacked.

Helm 2 and Tiller. Gone since 2020.

The quieter one is new. Kubernetes 1.37 formally deprecated kube-proxy’s IPVS mode, per the project’s v1.37 sneak peek, so if “IPVS tuning” sits in your requirements because somebody made a performance fix five years ago, that’s another migration now, and it belongs in the platform section rather than the skills list.

The Saturday Nights Nobody Mentioned

Kubernetes postings love the phrase “participate in on-call.” It tells a candidate nothing. They know it tells them nothing, so they’ll ask anyway, and you might as well save everyone the call.

Say how many clusters sit behind the rotation and how many people share it. Say whether application teams get paged for their own services or whether everything lands on the platform team first. How often did it actually fire last quarter? And do upgrades happen during business hours, or in a weekend maintenance window? Be specific. Candidates can smell a rounded number.

A medical device software company in Carlsbad had been running a platform search for four months when they handed it to us. Good pay, good product, remote-friendly. What the posting left out was that validated change control put every cluster upgrade between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. on a Saturday, with a quality engineer on the bridge line, about once a quarter per environment, across three environments. Close to a dozen Saturday nights a year. The two candidates who reached the final round both heard about it from the team in the last interview, and both withdrew. I would have too, I think. Or at least asked for a lot more money.

Their next posting put the schedule in the second paragraph, along with the extra day off that came with each window. It filled in five weeks. Not because the Saturdays got any better. Nobody felt ambushed. That was the whole difference.

Salary Ranges by Level, and the Row That Breaks Budgets

Put a range in the posting. A growing number of states require one, and candidates everywhere else read a missing number as a low one, which, going by the offer letters I see, it usually is.

These bands come from our Kubernetes engineer salary guide, which blends public pay data with KORE1’s own placements across more than 30 U.S. metros.

The bottom row is where budgets go sideways. Cluster security and multi-cluster work pays close to staff level at six years of experience, and a posting that wants Kyverno policy design, image signing, and multi-tenant isolation at a mid-level number is shopping for something the market doesn’t sell at that price. I see it monthly. If security really is the center of the seat, the cloud security engineer job description template may be the better fit. Metro moves the number, too. The same guide puts the Bay Area roughly 29% above the national figure, and for a single metro, our salary benchmark assistant will give you a tighter number than any table can.

Some of this work shouldn’t be a permanent seat at all. On our desk, senior contractors who do platform or cluster security work usually bill between $95 and $150 an hour. For a migration that will actually finish, a contract platform engineer often costs less than a full-time hire you’d have to find new work for afterward. When the need is a few months of upgrade hands across many clusters rather than a role, cloud staff augmentation is the lighter version of the same idea.

Kubernetes Engineer Job Description Template

It runs short on purpose. Fill the bracketed blanks. The bracketed sentences written to you are my notes, and they come out before anyone outside the company sees it. If you catch yourself adding a twelfth skills bullet, go back and add a sentence to the platform section instead.

Job Title

[Senior Kubernetes Engineer / Platform Engineer, Kubernetes / Site Reliability Engineer, Kubernetes Platform] [Put Kubernetes in the title only when the clusters are most of the job. If they’re a third of it, keep your standard title and use Kubernetes in the first sentence.]

About the Role

[Company] is hiring a [senior] Kubernetes engineer to own [the EKS platform behind our claims, billing, and customer portal services / the GKE clusters that run our analytics product / our AKS environment inside a regulated Azure tenant]. You’ll join a platform team of [N], reporting to [named role] and supporting [N] application teams that deploy about [N] times a week. [Work arrangement: remote within the U.S. / [N] office days per week in [city] / fully in the [city] office.]

The Platform as It Stands

• [N] clusters on [EKS / GKE / AKS / OpenShift / self-managed on VMware], running Kubernetes [1.3X]. [If versions differ by cluster, say which run what.]
• Upgrade status: [current within one release / “Two clusters are in EKS extended support, and getting them to 1.35 is your first project.”]
• Ingress: [Gateway API on [controller] / ingress-nginx, moving to Gateway API by [quarter] / our cloud’s load balancer controller]. [Write the true one.]
• Delivery through [Argo CD / Flux], infrastructure in [Terraform / OpenTofu / Pulumi], packaging with [Helm / Kustomize].
• [Cilium / Calico / AWS VPC CNI] for networking, with [Kyverno / OPA Gatekeeper] enforcing Pod Security Admission at the [baseline / restricted] level.
• Metrics and logs land in [Prometheus and Grafana / Datadog / your cloud’s native stack].

Your First Six Months

[Two or three sentences in real priority order. For example: “Upgrade our four production clusters from 1.32 to 1.35 by March. Retire ingress-nginx. Then take over cost reporting from the finance analyst who’s been keeping it in a spreadsheet.” Candidates remember this paragraph longer than anything else in the posting.]

What You’ll Own

• Cluster lifecycle across [N] environments, including provisioning, version upgrades, node images, and add-on compatibility
• Access control through RBAC and [EKS Pod Identity / IRSA / GKE Workload Identity / Microsoft Entra Workload ID], with least privilege as the default
• Autoscaling with [Karpenter / Cluster Autoscaler] and [HPA / KEDA], plus the cost report that shows whether any of it is working
• The paved path application teams use to ship, such as [Helm charts / Argo CD ApplicationSets / Backstage templates]
• [On-call, stated plainly: “One week in [N] on the platform rotation, which paged [N] times last quarter.”]
• Postmortems for platform incidents, written so the next engineer can actually learn from them

What You Bring

• [X]+ years operating production Kubernetes on [EKS / GKE / AKS], including at least one minor version upgrade you planned and ran yourself
• Kubernetes networking past the basics, meaning Services, CoreDNS, NetworkPolicy, and at least one ingress or Gateway API controller in production
• Infrastructure as code in [Terraform / OpenTofu], reviewed through pull requests like any other code
• Enough Linux to figure out why a node won’t join the cluster
• The worst upgrade you’ve been part of, and the part of it that went wrong. [This line screens better than the years number above it.]

Nice to Have

• A completed move from ingress-nginx to Gateway API [only if that migration is still ahead of you]
• Go, for writing or patching controllers [only if someone on the team already does this]
• A current CKA or CKS [Current matters, since both expire after two years. Never make it required.]
• [A regulated environment, if yours is one. Someone who has already sat through a PCI DSS or HIPAA review of a shared cluster ramps months faster.]

Pay and Where the Work Happens

Base pay of [$165,000 to $205,000], with [bonus percentage], [equity, if offered], and [the benefits worth naming]. [Work arrangement again, briefly.] [On-call frequency and the maintenance window schedule, including any nights or weekends.] [Post the range. Several states require it, and everywhere else a posting without one draws fewer senior applicants.]

What Directors of Platform Engineering Want Settled

Does a Kubernetes Engineer title shrink the applicant pool?

Noticeably, because most people who run clusters for a living carry DevOps, platform, or site reliability titles instead. Use Kubernetes in the title when the clusters are most of the job, and in the first sentence when they aren’t.

The narrower title isn’t all bad. It screens out generalists who touched a cluster once. What it costs you is the platform engineer who ran eleven clusters at her last company and searches job boards for “platform engineer,” which describes most of them. When reliability rather than the cluster is the real mandate, our SRE job description template is the better place to start.

Our last posting required a CKA. Is that why it stalled?

$445 and a two-hour, hands-on exam earns a Certified Kubernetes Administrator credential, and it expires after two years, so requiring one mostly filters for recent test-takers rather than for operators.

The Linux Foundation’s CKA page currently lists the exam as based on Kubernetes 1.35, and passing it takes real command-line work, so it’s a fair signal. Just not a gate. Several engineers I’d trust with a production upgrade let theirs lapse years ago, mostly because no employer ever asked to see it.

Our clusters run on EKS Auto Mode. What’s left to put in the posting?

Nearly everything except node provisioning. Auto Mode and GKE Autopilot take the node chores off your plate, while networking, ingress, access control, add-on upgrades, cost, and incident response still belong to someone on your team.

Say which mode you run in the platform section, because it changes the day more than it changes the title. An engineer who spent three years tuning Karpenter will want to know whether there’s any Karpenter left to tune. Some will be relieved. Some will pass.

We haven’t started the Gateway API migration. Should the posting mention it?

Mention it, with a quarter attached. A dated plan reads as a team that follows upstream, and silence reads as a team that hasn’t heard ingress-nginx was retired.

It changes who applies, too. People who have already done one of these migrations lean in, and a few will want to argue about controller choice in the first interview. Let them. That argument is a decent preview of how they’d work with your application teams during the cutover, which is where these projects usually get loud.

How much of our tooling should we actually list?

Only what runs in production today, plus anything with a funded plan and a date attached to it.

Candidates read a tool list as a map of the platform. Every item that isn’t really there sends someone into the first interview with the wrong picture, and correcting it costs you credibility at the exact moment you’re trying to earn some. An Anaheim retailer lost a finalist this summer over Istio, which was in their posting and nowhere in their clusters. He asked about the mesh topology. There wasn’t one. The interview never quite recovered.

Realistically, how long until a senior Kubernetes engineer starts?

Four to eight weeks to an accepted offer is normal for a senior direct hire, and then a notice period on top of that, usually two weeks.

Our IT desk as a whole averages 17 days from search to hire. Senior platform searches take longer, because nearly everyone who can do the work already has a job and a manager who’d like to keep them. Most of the calendar isn’t sourcing, though. It’s the loop. Each extra week of interviews hands a competing employer another chance to make an offer first, and the good candidates usually have one of those in motion. When candidates start arriving, our Kubernetes engineer interview questions can help you keep that loop short without making it shallow.

Start With Two Commands

If I were rewriting a Kubernetes req this afternoon, I’d ask whoever holds the admin credentials to run two things on every cluster, kubectl version and kubectl get ingressclass. Five minutes. Those answers become the first two lines of the platform section, and they tell a candidate more than the other four hundred words put together.

The rest follows from being honest about the first six months. The upgrade that’s overdue. The controller that stopped getting patches. The Saturday windows. I’ve been in this business since long before Docker existed, and the searches that go well nearly always start with a posting that admits something. A year after we place someone, 92% are still in the seat, and I’d give most of the credit to jobs that turned out to be the job we described.

If you have a draft req, have our Kubernetes recruiters read it before it goes live, and we’ll tell you what a senior platform engineer is going to ask about it. And if the upgrade can’t wait for the hire, a direct hire search and a short contract can run side by side. Plenty of our clients do exactly that.