Platform Engineer (Kubernetes RKE2, ArgoCD, Cilium) for NATO with security clearance

A NATO organisation in Brussels runs its own Kubernetes platform on premise, and it is looking for the person who keeps it healthy. This is a pure platform-operations role: the clusters, the tooling inside them, and the monthly evidence that the whole thing is compliant and under control. Application development and the underlying virtual, storage and network infrastructure sit with other teams. What you would be doing

• Daily monitoring of cluster health and alerts, and node lifecycle operations - join, drain, cordon, replacement.
• Managing the Kubernetes components: CNI, CSI, ingress, metrics server and CoreDNS.
• Certificate rotation and secrets management, RBAC administration with periodic audits, and network policy management.
• Upgrades and patching, including quarterly upgrade readiness.
• Vulnerability scanning and remediation inside the cluster.
• Backup operations with Velero or K10 (disaster recovery testing stays with the customer).
• Maintaining documentation and runbooks, and helping application teams troubleshoot their deployments.
• Producing the monthly artefacts: cluster health, security compliance (CIS benchmarks, RBAC audit, network policy, vulnerabilities), capacity and performance, patching and upgrades, incidents and root cause analysis, configuration drift against the approved baseline, the change log and the risk register.

The stack inside the cluster

• Prometheus and Grafana, a logging stack, NGINX or another ingress, Cilium CNI.
• Backup tooling, an on-premise registry such as Harbor or SUSE, ArgoCD for GitOps, metrics server, cert-manager and Zabbix integration hooks.

• A university degree plus three years of relevant experience, or the equivalent.
• Three or more years of hands-on Kubernetes operations.
• Experience with SUSE RKE2.
• Real experience of monitoring, logging, registries, ingress, CNI and backup tooling.
• Nice to have: an international environment with both military and civilian colleagues, and an understanding of NATO’s structure.

Practical detail

• Brussels, Belgium - on site; most daily activity has to be done in the office. No travel.
• 28 September to 31 December 2026, 570 hours in total.
• You must hold a valid clearance and be a citizen of a NATO member country with the right to work in Belgium.