Who We Are
Solera is a global leader in data and software services that strives to transform every touchpoint of the vehicle lifecycle into a connected digital experience. In addition, we provide products and services to protect life's other most important assets: our homes and digital identities. Today, Solera processes over 300 million digital transactions annually for approximately 235,000 partners and customers in more than 90 countries. Our 6,500 team members foster an uncommon, innovative culture and are dedicated to successfully bringing the future to bear today through cognitive answers, insights, algorithms and automation. For more information, please visit solera.com.
The Role
We are looking for a Senior Kubernetes Engineer to join our Virtualization Platform team, supporting Solera's key Kubernetes platforms for the global market. This hands-on engineer will be part of a global team of 10+ engineers and managers responsible for building, maturing, and supporting Solera applications on Kubernetes platforms across virtualization environments and the public cloud. You will own significant workstreams end to end, set technical direction for how our clusters are built and operated, and act as a senior escalation point for the platform.
This role requires deep technical expertise, a keen eye for detail, a tenacious mindset to overcome challenges, and a commitment to quality.
What You'll Do
- Own and deliver platform workstreams end to end — lifecycle upgrades across a large multi-region cluster estate (Kubernetes, node OS, service mesh, ingress, and platform add-ons), from planning and pre-work through documentation and rollout.
- Design and improve how clusters are built and managed: GitOps-driven provisioning, cluster lifecycle automation, and standardised Helm charts consumed by development teams.
- Act as a senior escalation point in an on-call rotation for highly available enterprise-class systems, leading incident diagnosis to root cause and driving the follow-up actions.
- Partner directly with application engineering teams on resource optimisation, rightsizing, workload resiliency, and remediation of platform-level blockers.
- Strengthen container security and networking posture — runtime policy enforcement, secrets management, image supply chain, and ingress/API gateway configuration.
- Shape and maintain the Kubernetes roadmap alongside the operations leads: estimate scope, sequence work against business outcomes, and flag risk early.
- Mentor engineers on the team, review their designs and changes, and raise the bar on documentation and operational practice.
- Author and maintain runbooks, standards, and internal documentation that other engineers and development teams rely on as the source of truth.
- Complete daily operational work — change requests, troubleshooting tickets — and systematically convert recurring toil into automation.
What You'll Bring
Qualifications
- Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or equivalent experience.
- Experience: 5+ years of hands-on experience operating Kubernetes in production, including at least 2 years at scale across multiple clusters or regions (Rancher/RKE2, Tanzu, OpenShift, PCF, EKS/AKS, or upstream Kubernetes).
Key Skills
- Deep working knowledge of the Kubernetes ecosystem and adjacent platform tooling — ArgoCD, Kong, Vault, Traefik, NeuVector, Istio, ingress-nginx, cert-manager, Prometheus/Grafana, or close equivalents.
- Strong understanding of container runtimes (containerd, Docker) and a Kubernetes distribution such as Rancher Kubernetes Engine, including cluster upgrade and node lifecycle mechanics.
- Proficient scripting and automation skills — Bash and Python (or PowerShell/Go) — with a demonstrated track record of eliminating manual work through code, Ansible, or GitOps.
- Proven ability to lead complex, cross-team technical projects independently and make sound design decisions with minimal supervision.
- Experience mentoring or technically guiding less experienced engineers.
- Strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail, with the flexibility to adapt and meet changing demands.
- Proactive ownership within a collaborative, globally distributed environment.
- Ability to thrive under pressure in a demanding environment, with a commitment to excellence.
- Intellectually curious and prepared to challenge and be challenged.
Desirable Skills
- Container networking and security at depth — CNI behaviour, network policy, runtime security enforcement, TLS and certificate management.
- Cluster API / infrastructure-as-code provisioning of Kubernetes clusters on vSphere or equivalent.
- Storage integration in Kubernetes (CSI drivers, NetApp, Dell, or similar).
- Monitoring, alerting, and logging at scale — Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, Elasticsearch or Graylog — including alert routing and noise reduction.
- CI/CD pipelines and modern DevOps practice, including GitHub Actions.
- Backup and disaster recovery for Kubernetes (Velero or equivalent).
- VMware platforms and public cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Personal Characteristics
- Proactive and results-oriented with a passion for achieving goals and driving excellence within the team.
- High degree of adaptability and resilience, with the ability to thrive in a dynamic and fast-paced environment.
- Strong attention to detail, integrity, and accountability.
- Willingness to work flexible hours across time zones and take ownership of challenges as they arise.
