Senior Software Engineer – Kubernetes & Go (Customer Escalations)

Senior Software Engineer Location: San Jose, CA (Remote), United States Job Type: Contract Experience: 5+ Years Role Overview The Senior Software Engineer operates at the intersection of Support, Product Engineering, and Customer Reliability, acting as a technical authority during high-severity escalations. This role requires deep expertise in Kubernetes internals, Go microservices, and distributed systems, with responsibility for delivering patches, hotfixes, and long-term product hardening. You will ensure customer environments remain stable, supported, and up to date while driving systemic engineering improvements across the platform. Key Responsibilities 1. Escalation Ownership & Root Cause Analysis Own high-severity customer escalations end-to-end: reproduction, root cause, fix, verification, and customer confirmation. Debug complex issues across Kubernetes control plane, cluster lifecycle, networking, storage, and workload runtime. Produce clear, technically rigorous RCA documents suitable for customer and executive review. Partner closely with Support, TAMs, and Customer Success to unblock production issues quickly. 2. Code Fixes, Backports & Patch Delivery Deliver production-quality fixes in Go across Palette microservices and Kubernetes-native components. Backport fixes across multiple supported release branches with strong regression discipline. Drive hotfix, patch, and CVE releases in coordination with QA, Release Engineering, and Product. Maintain high code-review standards: small, safe, well-tested, and well-documented changes. 3. Reproduction, Test Coverage & Regression Prevention Build reproduction environments and minimal test cases that convert customer scenarios into reusable engineering assets. Expand unit, integration, and end-to-end test coverage to prevent regressions. Partner with QA to harden test suites based on real-world failure modes. Identify systemic gaps in observability, error handling, and upgrade paths, driving them to closure. 4. Product Feedback & Long-Term Hardening Identify recurring escalation patterns and drive engineering changes that eliminate root causes. Feed insights into Product Management and feature teams to influence roadmap and design reviews. Improve upgrade, rollback, and day-2 operations based on customer signals. Contribute to supportability improvements: logs, diagnostics, must-gather tooling, and self-service remediation. 5. Responsible AI-Accelerated Engineering Use generative AI tools responsibly to accelerate log triage, stack trace analysis, reproduction scaffolding, and RCA drafting. Apply effective prompt-engineering practices to improve debugging workflows. Validate all AI-generated artifacts to ensure correctness, security, and compliance. Engineering Philosophy The Customer Engineering organization operates with a discipline grounded in Clarity, Precision, Documentation-Driven Engineering (DDE), validation-first execution, and Absolute Ownership. Maintain clear Markdown-based RCAs, fix write-ups, and knowledge-base entries. Own escalations from symptom to fix, backport, verification, and preventative follow-through. Improve engineering KPIs: time-to-RCA, time-to-fix, backport lead time, repeat-defect rate. Collaborate across Development, Support, Product Engineering, QA, Release Engineering, and Security. Required Qualifications 3–4 years of hands-on software engineering experience in Engineering, Escalation Engineering, or similar production-focused roles. Strong Kubernetes experience: operating, debugging, and modifying Kubernetes components (controllers, operators, CAPI, CRDs). Strong development background — able to read, write, and ship production code. Proven ownership of high-severity customer escalations including code-level root cause and fix delivery. Experience backporting fixes across multiple supported release branches. Strong distributed-systems debugging skills across networking, storage, and control-plane behavior. Working knowledge of AWS, Azure, or GCP. Excellent written and verbal communication skills. If interested kindly share your updated CVs to [email protected]