Costco IT is responsible for the technical future of Costco Wholesale, the third largest retailer in the world with wholesale operations in fourteen countries. Despite our size and explosive international expansion, we continue to provide a family, employee centric atmosphere in which our employees thrive and succeed.

This is an environment unlike anything in the high-tech world and the secret of Costco’s success is its culture. The value Costco puts on its employees is well documented in articles from a variety of publishers including Bloomberg and Forbes. Our employees and our members come FIRST. Costco is well known for its generosity and community service and has won many awards for its philanthropy. The company joins with its employees to take an active role in volunteering by sponsoring many opportunities to help others.

Come join the Costco Wholesale IT family. Costco IT is a dynamic, fast-paced environment, working through exciting transformation efforts. We are building the next generation retail environment where you will be surrounded by dedicated and highly professional employees.

The Managed Container Platform team is responsible for Kubernetes infrastructure and associated platforms, tools, and services required to onboard applications into the container platform to containerize applications for Costco. The Container Engineering team manages the design, implementation, and configuration of Costco’s container platforms (OpenShift, AKS, GKE). The Managed Container team provides blueprints, a container ecosystem, and recommendations to value streams to containerize applications. They standardize container solutions and manage Day 1 and Day 2 activities to streamline customer processes, enabling a self-service onboarding process for value streams. The team also partners with leadership to deliver successful cloud and container solutions across the enterprise through Cloud Express.

The Principal Container Platform Engineer at Costco holds a critical leadership role within the organization, driving the strategic vision, design, and architecture of enterprise container platforms, including OpenShift, AKS, and GKE. As a senior technical leader, this role shapes the long-term technical strategy, spearheads innovation, and provides hands-on technical guidance to engineering teams. This position requires a deep understanding of container orchestration and leadership skills to influence the organization’s success in its multi-cloud strategy, leveraging Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It demands a dynamic approach, blending direct technical guidance, mentorship, and active participation in risk and growth management. Collaboration with leadership is integral, fostering a hands-on and collective effort to achieve organizational goals. This role also involves researching new Kubernetes solutions, standardizing implementations, understanding customer requirements, and enhancing products as needed.

Why Join Us?

● Drive the evolution of cutting-edge Kubernetes platforms across Azure and GCP in a multi-cloud environment.

● Collaborate with talented teams to solve technical challenges and make a lasting impact.

● Enjoy opportunities for career growth, technical mentorship, and exposure to the latest cloud-native technologies.

If you are a visionary engineer with a passion for innovation and leadership, we invite you to apply and join our dynamic team!

ROLE

● Leadership and Mentorship:

Leads and mentors engineering teams, fostering a culture of innovation, learning, and professional growth.
Conducts design and codes reviews, set technical standards, and promote best practices for modern container platforms.
Actively participates in risk and growth management, ensuring alignment with organizational priorities.

● Platform Architecture & Design:

Defines and implements scalable, secure, and efficient container orchestration architectures across Azure, GCP, and on-premises environments.
Develops and maintains reference architectures, design patterns, and guidelines for Kubernetes-based solutions.
Leverages emerging container and DevOps technologies to enhance platform performance and reliability.
Designs secure container products using OPA and Gatekeeper policies, partnering with Costco’s security and Cloud Engineering teams.
Enables self-service using Cloud Express and Crossplane product API provisioning.

● Operational Excellence:

Ensures platform stability, scalability, and observability through advanced monitoring and automation.
Troubleshoots complex production issues, providing technical leadership for root cause analysis and resolution.
Drives improvements in platform performance, security, and maintainability.

● Strategic Vision & Innovation:

Sets the strategic direction for container platform initiatives, aligning with the company’s multi-cloud strategy.
Researches emerging industry trends and guide the adoption of innovative tools and methodologies.
Actively contributes to the broader cloud and DevOps strategy, ensuring seamless integration with other IT systems.

● Observability & Monitoring:

Enables a single-pane monitoring dashboard for observability and implement advanced alerting mechanisms to reduce major incidents.
Provides dashboards for value streams to monitor their cluster/namespace and workload status.
Enables pod autoscaling and identify underutilized resources for cost optimization.

● Partners with engineering teams, Product Owners, and architects to align solutions with business requirements.

● Works closely with infrastructure, network, and security teams to maintain secure and performant systems.

● Leads technical forums, knowledge-sharing sessions, and workshops to promote a culture of collaboration.

● Creates and maintains comprehensive documentation for container platform processes, standards, and workflows.

● Defines and enforces best practices for platform usage, ensuring compliance with governance and security requirements.

● Works on system design through well-defined interfaces across multiple components, perform code reviews, and leverage data/telemetry to make decisions.

● Develops “best-in-class” engineering for services, ensuring they are well-defined, modularized, secure, reliable, diagnosable, actively monitored, and reusable.

● Improves test coverage for services, implement integration tests, and resolve problem areas.

● Ensures testability, portability, reliability, and maintainability, understanding when code is ready for sharing and delivery.

● Sets the strategic vision for hybrid container solutions in multi-cloud environments, aligning with organizational goals.

● Supports Costco’s architecture ecosystem by working with Enterprise Architecture, Solution Architects, System Architects, and Platform Architects to ensure security by design.

● Ensures the integrity, security, and performance of container products and solutions by partnering with platform, security, networking, and governance teams.

● Stays up-to-date with emerging technologies and assess their applicability to the organization.

● Collaborates with cross-functional teams, including enterprise architecture, security and compliance, engineers, platform engineers, and IT professionals, to develop comprehensive solutions.

● Fosters a collaborative environment that encourages knowledge sharing and skill development. Lead technical leadership forums and lunch-and-learn sessions for the engineering community.

● Establishes and enforces data quality standards and best practices, implementing processes for data validation, cleansing, and accuracy.

● Evaluates and selects appropriate container platforms and automation tools to meet business needs, partnering closely with platform and infrastructure teams during evaluations and implementations.

● Partners with Cloud Principal Engineers to enable strong cloud and container processes, runners, and container security.

● Implements measures to optimize performance and troubleshoot issues.

REQUIRED

● 10+ years’ experience in IT, with at least 5 years in Kubernetes/container platform engineering.

● Proven experience in architecting, deploying, and managing OpenShift, AKS, GKE, or equivalent platforms in large-scale multi-cloud environments.

● Extensive hands-on experience with cloud providers, specifically Azure and GCP.

● Observability & Monitoring:

o Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, Fluentd, or similar observability tools for monitoring, alerting, and distributed tracing.

o Knowledge of eBPF for advanced observability in containerized environments.

● Networking & Security:

o Deep understanding of CNI plugins like Calico, Cilium, or Flannel for Kubernetes networking.

o Experience with Pod Security Standards (PSS) and securing workloads with Kubernetes Network Policies.

o Familiarity with service meshes like Istio, Linkerd, or Consul for managing microservices communication.

● Automation & DevOps Tools:

o Proficiency with GitOps frameworks such as ArgoCD or FluxCD.

o Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines using tools like Jenkins, Azure DevOps, or GitHub Actions.

o Familiarity with Helm and Kustomize for managing Kubernetes manifests.

● Cloud-Native & Multi-Cloud:

o Hands-on experience with Anthos or similar tools for hybrid or multi-cloud Kubernetes management.

o Expertise in serverless platforms like Knative or AWS Lambda for containerized workloads.

● Storage Solutions:

o Knowledge of Kubernetes CSI drivers for managing persistent storage across various providers (e.g., NFS, Ceph, EBS, Azure Disk).

o Experience with distributed storage solutions like Rook, GlusterFS, or Portworx.

● Security & Compliance:

o Proficiency with container security tools like Aqua Security, Twistlock, Trivy, or Sysdig.

o Knowledge of runtime security and vulnerability scanning tools.

o Familiarity with compliance frameworks like SOC 2, HIPAA, or PCI DSS as they relate to containerized environments.

● Technical Expertise:

o Deep understanding of Kubernetes, container orchestration, and container runtime technologies (e.g., Docker, CRI-O).

o Expertise in infrastructure as code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or Ansible.

o Strong knowledge of networking, security, and observability in Kubernetes environments.

● Leadership Skills:

o Proven ability to lead and mentor engineering teams in a high-performance, collaborative environment.

o Strong communication and stakeholder management skills.

o Ability to balance hands-on engineering with strategic oversight.

● Preferred Qualifications

o Certifications such as Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKSS), or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD).

o Experience with Service Mesh, GitOps tools (e.g., ArgoCD), and container observability stacks.

● Proficiency in scripting languages like Python or Bash for automation tasks. Strong skills in Go, TFE as it’s widely used for Kubernetes-related development.

● Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs): Expertise in defining and managing CRDs to extend Kubernetes functionalities.

● Kubernetes Operators: Proficiency in building and deploying Kubernetes Operators to automate application lifecycle management.

● Proven track record with at least 15+ years of hands-on experience in Managed container platforms environments.

● 5+ years’ experience in leadership or senior roles; demonstrating the ability to guide and lead a team effectively.

● 5+ years’ experience working with Cloud and automation technologies, such as Azure, GCP, GitOps, ADO, Terraform and other technologies that facilitate technical implementation of DevOps.

● 5+ years’ experience in security and compliance as it relates to container platforms, tools and services

● Proven expertise in working with Container products, such as EKS, AKS or GKE, to architect and implement scalable and efficient solutions.

● Experience dealing with high-volume and high-velocity data streams, and designing systems that can handle the demands of real-time or near-real-time analytics.

● Experience in shaping the strategic vision for cloud & container and automation tools initiatives within an organization.

● Demonstrated ability to drive innovation, adapt to emerging technologies, and implement industry best practices.

● Demonstrated ability to take ownership and responsibility of critical issues and conclude them to resolution.

● Strong problem-solving and decision-making abilities.

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, health benefits - medical/dental/vision/hearing aid/pharmacy/behavioral health/employee assistance, health care reimbursement account, dependent care assistance plan, short-term disability and long-term disability insurance, AD&D insurance, life insurance, 401(k), stock purchase plan to eligible employees.

Costco is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Costco is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or any other legally protected status. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request to IT-Recruiting@costco.com

If hired, you will be required to provide proof of authorization to work in the United States. Applicants and employees for this position will not be sponsored for work authorization, including, but not limited to H1-B visas.

REQUIRED

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