Principal DevOps Engineer

NBCUniversal is a media and entertainment company producing and distributing film, television, streaming, news, and other entertainment content. The Principal DevOps Engineer will architect and evolve a Kubernetes-native platform for broadcast production environments, automating cloud infrastructure provisioning and lifecycle management across hybrid environments. The role also leads platform architecture, Go-based systems development, networking, security, GitOps delivery, observability, and engineering mentorship.

Responsibilities:

• Platform Architecture & Vision: Architect a Kubernetes-native platform that models broadcast infrastructure as custom resources. Lead the technical strategy leveraging Crossplane compositions and custom Go functions to automate provisioning across multi-account AWS environments and on-prem control rooms
• Systems Engineering & Integrations: Design, build, and maintain production-grade Kubernetes operators, controllers, and internal platform APIs in Go. You will actively develop custom Crossplane providers to deeply integrate external enterprise platforms (such as NRCS, Venafi, and Infoblox) into our control plane, managing resource lifecycles and approval workflows
• Infrastructure & Networking Delivery: Lead the design of cloud networking, DNS strategies, and cross-account connectivity across hybrid environments, automating VPC topology and dynamic network routing
• Cross-Discipline Collaboration: Partner closely with broadcast systems engineers, system integrators, and external vendors to bridge the gap between broadcast hardware and automated infrastructure. You will lead efforts to "Puppet-ize" bare-metal compute configurations and integrate proprietary vendor solutions into our configuration-as-code ecosystem
• Technical Leadership: Serve as a technical authority for the team. Write RFCs, drive architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and establish high-confidence CI/CD pipelines, testing strategies, and GitHub Actions automation
• Access & Security Strategy: Own the platform's authorization model, designing hierarchical RBAC systems, resource identifier schemes, and identity integrations that enforce fine-grained access control
• Operational Excellence: Drive GitOps-based continuous delivery (Flux, Kustomize, Helm) and manage configuration-as-code for compute fleets using Puppet. Ensure deep operational visibility by designing comprehensive observability and alerting stacks
• VDI Integration: Oversee the integration of remote desktop/VDI connectivity solutions, focusing on session authentication, credential management, and gateway routing

Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience designing, building, and operating production infrastructure and cloud-native platforms at enterprise scale
• Strong proficiency in Go (systems-level programming, API servers) and deep experience building Kubernetes controllers/operators using patterns like controller-runtime and kubebuilder
• Expert-level knowledge of the Kubernetes ecosystem, including CRD/XRD generation, operators, informers, admission webhooks, and RBAC
• Deep production experience with Crossplane, including composite resources, composition functions, and specifically developing custom Crossplane providers in Go to integrate external enterprise platforms
• Extensive production experience with AWS multi-account architectures, cross-account networking patterns, and identity federation. Requires depth across EKS, EC2, VPC, IAM, STS, SSM, Secrets Manager, Route 53, and S3
• Production experience with GitOps tooling, specifically Flux (HelmRelease, Kustomization) or ArgoCD for continuous delivery on Kubernetes
• Hands-on experience with Puppet, including module development, PuppetDB, Hiera, and r10k
• Experience designing REST APIs with middleware patterns and modern authentication (OAuth/JWT)
• Keen eye for information security, including cross-account IAM trust chains, least-privilege policies, JWT token lifecycles, and secrets abstraction
• Strong background in designing telemetry platforms using Grafana, Prometheus/Mimir, Loki, OpenTelemetry, and metrics collection agents (Alloy, Prometheus Node Exporter)
• Working knowledge of PostgreSQL, SQLite or similar relational databases, encompassing schema design, migrations, and query optimization
• Excellent problem-solving skills with a proven ability to present architectural decisions to executives, engage with vendors, and write clear technical documentation
• Ability to script routine tasks in Bash and PowerShell
• Familiarity with broadcast/media production workflows and the strict operational constraints of live production environments
• Experience with the Crossplane function SDK for building custom composition functions in Go, and operating in Kubernetes disaster recovery situations (Velero cluster restoration, backups)
• Familiarity with VDI Solutions (NICE DCV, Leostream, PCoIP, etc), machine identity workflows, and PKI certificate management (Venafi or similar)
• Experience with hybrid DNS architectures (Infoblox), software-defined networking (VPC peering, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, CloudWan), and Envoy Gateway / Gateway API
• Familiarity with advanced testing frameworks (k6, KUTTL, etc), SOPS for encrypted GitOps configurations, and local development workflows (Air, kind/colima)
• Active contributions to open-source projects, particularly within the CNCF / Kubernetes ecosystem