Senior Platform Engineer, Operator

About Ditto: Ditto is redefining how data moves at the edge. Our mission is to make it seamless for developers to build resilient, real-time applications, regardless of network conditions. Whether you're in a stadium, airplane, or remote military base, Ditto's peer-to-peer sync engine ensures devices stay connected and data stays consistent, even without internet. With more than $145 million in funding and trusted by organizations like Chick-fil-A, Delta Airlines, and the U.S. military, Ditto powers mission-critical experiences across aviation, retail, travel, hospitality, defense, and more. As a globally distributed, fast-growing startup, we’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive team that reflects the wide range of perspectives needed to solve the world’s hardest connectivity problems. WHAT YOU'LL BE UP TO… - Own the architecture and evolution of the SMBP Operator's CRD API surface, designing extensions that meet enterprise expectations — consistent status conditions, configurable security contexts, fine-grained network configuration, and admission validation that surfaces bad configs at apply time rather than deep in the reconciliation loop. - Design and implement flexible network configuration patterns that give customers choice of ingress controller, load balancer, and traffic management approach — without prescribing specific Kubernetes ecosystem components or hardcoding controller-specific behaviour. - Build the observability integration enterprise customers expect: Prometheus-native metrics, ServiceMonitor CRDs for automatic scraping, Kubernetes Events emission throughout the reconciliation lifecycle, and pre-built dashboards that surface operator and cluster health without manual instrumentation. - Harden the operator's security posture across pod security contexts, network policies, supply chain integrity (image signing, SBOM), and the configuration surfaces that every enterprise security team will audit before approving a production deployment. - Make SMBP deployable across the full enterprise Kubernetes landscape — EKS, GKE, AKS, OpenShift, and air-gapped on-prem — including OLM support, OperatorHub listing, and the multi-distribution testing infrastructure that validates real upgrade and failure scenarios. - Build operational tooling that makes the operator supportable at scale: must-gather diagnostics, kubectl plugins, compatibility matrices, and documented upgrade paths — the infrastructure that lets support and customer engineering teams resolve issues without needing cluster access. - Partner with customer-facing teams and directly engage enterprise customers to understand deployment requirements, work through technical escalations, and ensure that what you build reflects how customers actually run Kubernetes in production. WHAT HELPS YOU THRIVE… - Production Rust experience — you are comfortable owning a large, multi-crate Rust workspace, navigating async Rust, and reasoning about lifetimes and ownership in a long-running reconciliation loop context. - Deep Kubernetes internals — you understand how controllers, reconciliation loops, watches, owner references, finalizers, admission webhooks, and status subresources actually work; you've debugged controllers in production, not just written YAML against them. - Kubernetes operator development — hands-on experience building or maintaining a real Kubernetes operator using controller-runtime, kube-runtime, kubebuilder, or an equivalent framework; you understand the operational difference between a true reconciliation controller and a Helm wrapper. - Kubernetes networking fluency — you have worked with Service types, Ingress, IngressClass, and at least one major ingress controller at the configuration level; you can reason about the trade-offs between Ingress, LoadBalancer, and Gateway API as exposure patterns. - StatefulSet management in production — you understand rolling updates, PVC lifecycle, pod disruption budgets, and the operational implications of