Role Title : AVP, Kubernetes Engineer (L10)

Company Overview: Synchrony (NYSE: SYF) is a leading consumer financing company that has been at the heart of American commerce and opportunity for nearly a century. Synchrony delivers credit and banking products that empower tens of millions of consumers to improve their financial lives and access what matters most. Leveraging innovative solutions that are shaping the future of retail commerce, Synchrony supports the growth and success of some of the nation's most respected brands, alongside hundreds of thousands of small and midsize businesses, including health and wellness providers. Committed to excellence in service and culture, Synchrony is proud to be named as #3 as a Great Place to Work® in India and is honored to be ranked the #1 Best Company to Work For® in the U.S. by Fortune magazine and Great Place to Work®. For more information, visit www.synchrony.com.

Organizational Overview

The Cloud Operations team focused on container platforms is responsible for keeping application environments stable, secure, and scalable in day-to-day operations. Their work typically includes building and maintaining container images, managing Kubernetes clusters, supporting deployments, monitoring platform health, and resolving production issues quickly. They also partner with development teams to improve release reliability, standardize platform practices, and automate repetitive operational tasks.

Role Summary/Purpose

We are seeking an experienced Kubernetes Engineer in a Container Operations team who builds and runs resilient container platforms that support secure, scalable application delivery across enterprise environments. The role manages day-to-day cluster operations on TKGI and AWS, including provisioning, upgrades, performance tuning, and platform reliability improvements. The role partners closely with development and SRE teams to streamline deployments, standardize operating practices, and quickly resolve runtime issues in production. They also strengthen platform governance through automation, observability, and security controls, ensuring consistent service quality and compliance across cloud and on-prem workloads.

Key Responsibilities

Design, deploy, and operate Kubernetes clusters across environments (dev/test/prod).
Implement/maintain cluster lifecycle: provisioning, upgrades, patching, node pools, capacity planning.
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines for containerized workloads; enable GitOps practices.
Ensure reliability and performance: monitoring, alerting, logging, SLOs/SLIs, incident response.
Implement security controls: RBAC, Network Policies, Pod Security, secrets management, compliance.
Build IaC for cluster and app platform components; standardize reusable modules.
Partner with application teams to onboard apps, resolve deployment issues, and optimize workloads.
Manage ingress, load balancing, certificates, and service exposure patterns.
Manage persistent storage and backup/restore strategies.

Required Skills/Knowledge

6+ years in Infrastructure/DevOps/SRE with strong hands-on Kubernetes operations.
Kubernetes core concepts: API objects, controllers, scheduling, taints/tolerations, RBAC, namespaces.
Containers: Docker/OCI, image build, registries, scanning basics.
Observability: Splunk and New relic ,ELK/EFK or similar; troubleshooting skills.
Security fundamentals: least privilege, TLS, certs, secrets (KMS/Vault/K8s secrets), image scanning.
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform/CloudFormation; config mgmt. (Ansible) helpful.
Strong Linux, networking (DNS, TCP/IP), storage basics; Kubernetes networking/storage.
Ingress controllers (NGINX/ALB), L4/L7 concepts, cert-manager basics.

Desired Characteristics

Cluster API, Karpenter, advanced autoscaling and capacity optimization.
Multi-cluster/federation patterns; platform engineering experience.
OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing (Jaeger/Tempo), SRE practices.
Service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), policy-as-code (OPA/Gatekeeper/Kyverno).
Platform templates, internal developer platform (Backstage), golden paths.

Eligibility Criteria

6+ years total IT experience with at least 3+ years hands-on Kubernetes in production.
Bachelor's in CS/IT or equivalent practical experience.
Demonstrated delivery/support experience for enterprise-grade systems.
Comfortable working in on-call/rotation (if applicable).
Experience with at least one cloud provider or enterprise virtualization.
Strong communication/collaboration skills; can work with dev and security teams.
Proven track record of operating production services.

Work Timings: 2:00 PM to 11:00 PM IST

This role qualifies for Enhanced Flexibility offered in Synchrony India and will require the incumbent to be available between 06:00 AM Eastern Time – 11:30 AM Eastern Time (timings are anchored to US Eastern hours and will adjust twice a year locally). This window is for meetings with India and US teams. The remaining hours will be flexible for the employee to choose. Exceptions may apply periodically due to business needs) We are proud to offer flexibility at Synchrony. Our way of working allows you the option to work from home or workspaces in our Regional Engagement Hubs—Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Pune, Kolkata, or Delhi/NCR. Occasionally you may be required to commute or travel to Hyderabad or one of the Regional Engagement Hubs for in person engagement activities such as business or team meetings, trainings, and culture events.

For Internal Applicants

Understand the criteria or mandatory skills required for the role, before applying
Inform your manager or HRM before applying for the role on Workday
Ensure that your professional profile is updated (fields such as education, prior experience, skills) and it is mandatory to upload your updated resume (Word or PDF format)
Must not be any corrective action plan (First Formal/Final Formal, LPP)
L08 + Employees who have completed 18 months in the organization and 12 months in current role and level are only eligible
L08+ Employees can apply

Grade/Level: 10

Job Family Group

Information Technology