Kubernetes Team Lead Jobs (NOW HIRING)

Role overview

The DevX PaaS team builds and operates CarGurus' Kubernetes-based developer platform that enables product teams to ship quickly, reliably, and at scale. We're a sub-team within Developer Experience in Engineering Platform, partnering across engineering to remove friction, modernize our stack, and accelerate time-to-market.

This is a player-coach leadership role. As Team Lead, you'll own the day-to-day leadership of a small team of engineers - running ceremonies, planning quarterly capacity, growing the people on your team, and serving as the primary point of contact for PaaS across Engineering Platform - while staying technically hands-on enough to make meaningful contributions on our most important platform work - autoscaling, agentic automation of cluster maintenance and upgrades, service discovery, and the continued evolution of our proprietary Mach5 platform with AWS-native capabilities. You'll be the connective tissue between our platform's technical direction and the developers who depend on it every day.

Three big bets anchor the team's near-term direction: keeping Kubernetes healthy and cost-efficient through autoscaling and increasingly automated maintenance; piloting an AI-assisted support model for developer questions (starting with PaaS); and standing up service discovery (and eventually service mesh) to simplify how services connect. Everything below ladders up to these themes.

What you'll do

Lead the team

• Own team operations for DevX PaaS: run 1:1s, sprint ceremonies, and quarterly capacity and project planning, and represent PaaS in Engineering Platform planning and prioritization forums.
• Grow the engineers on your team through coaching, feedback, and equitable allocation of high-impact, growth-oriented work - including an "epic lead" model where engineers own end-to-end delivery of major initiatives.
• Shape the team's quarterly portfolio so that the team's energy is spent on the highest-leverage work, balancing a heavy load of non-discretionary platform work (upgrades, migrations, maintenance, on-call) against modernization and strategic initiatives.
• Be the primary point of contact for PaaS across Engineering Platform - framing problems, aligning on scope, and making sure downstream teams understand impacts and timelines.

Drive the platform (hands-on)

• Help design, build, and operate the Kubernetes platform on AWS EKS with a focus on reliability, security, and developer ergonomics (multi-env, multi-region).
• Guide the team's Controller/Operator and deployment model (e.g., CGService) to provide consistent, self-service delivery across repositories and environments.
• Lead critical upgrades and rollouts: Kubernetes, Rancher, and routine add-on upgrades utilizing ArgoCD and HCP Terraform.
• Set the direction for autoscaling across product and EP services - driving automated scale-down, day-2 EKS optimizations, and cost/performance wins in partnership with product teams.
• Champion agentic and AI-assisted workflows for cluster maintenance - automating EKS upgrades, PR generation, and bundled maintenance to reduce manual toil and create predictable, low-disruption maintenance windows.
• Advance service discovery (and eventually service mesh) to provide a robust, automated way for services to find and communicate with each other, reducing hard-coded dependencies and improving system resilience.
• Expand our proprietary Mach5 platform with AWS-native capabilities, continuing to shield developers from Kubernetes complexity while modernizing the underlying stack.
• Guide remaining platform modernization, including the tail end of the ingress-nginx retirement / Gateway API migration, to simplify developer configuration and reduce operational toil.
• Pilot a more scalable, AI-assisted support model for developer questions - starting with PaaS - by curating documentation, embedding AI into the support flow, and reducing the manual triage burden on the team.
• Raise platform reliability by hardening alerting/runbooks and participating in the team's on-call rotation with sensible, business-hours expectations and documented handoffs.

Communicate and partner

• Represent PaaS in EP-level forums (all-hands, capacity planning, leads meetings), translating technical trade-offs into clear, audience-appropriate language for both engineers and executive stakeholders.
• Build relationships across DevX, Engineering Platform, and product teams to advocate for the platform work that matters and to keep partners aligned and informed.
• Champion a healthy, customer-centric operating model where platform priorities are visible and traceable to the outcomes our customer teams care about.

What you'll bring

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer in a professional setting, with some experience leading projects, mentoring engineers, or acting as a tech lead / team lead.
• Deep Kubernetes/EKS experience operating production workloads at scale, with proficiency in containerization and cloud environments.
• Strong Go (or equivalent) systems programming skills; familiarity with controller/operator patterns is a plus.
• AWS fluency across core primitives (networking, IAM, load balancing, storage) and platform guardrails.
• Infrastructure as Code experience (Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, GitHub-based workflows) and CI/CD automation.
• An observability and SRE mindset: metrics, tracing, logging, SLOs, incident response, and post-incident learning.
• A security-by-default bent: policy-as-code (e.g., Kyverno), least-privilege, image/runtime controls.
• People leadership instincts: you enjoy growing engineers, running a calm and predictable team, and making sharp prioritization calls under competing demands.
• Developer empathy and clear communication; you enjoy building paved roads that hundreds of engineers can rely on, and you can tailor your message to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• An enthusiasm for leveraging AI to accelerate both your team's work and how the platform enables engineering.