Service Mesh Engineer (Istio / Linkerd) in United States at Jobgether

This position is posted by Jobgether on behalf of a partner company. We are currently looking for a Service Mesh Engineer (Istio / Linkerd) in the United States.

This role focuses on building and operating modern service mesh platforms that enable secure, observable, and resilient service-to-service communication across large Kubernetes environments. You will work at the core of platform engineering, shaping how microservices communicate through Istio and/or Linkerd in production-grade, multi-cluster architectures. The position plays a key role in driving zero-trust networking, traffic control, and observability strategies across distributed systems. You will collaborate closely with SRE, security, and application teams to ensure smooth adoption of service mesh capabilities without unnecessary operational complexity. The environment is highly technical and infrastructure-focused, requiring strong expertise in networking, Kubernetes, and cloud-native patterns. Your work will directly impact system reliability, performance, and scalability across mission-critical workloads. This is a hands-on engineering role combining deep technical execution with platform strategy and enablement.

• Design, deploy, and operate service mesh platforms using Istio and/or Linkerd across multi-cluster Kubernetes environments.
• Implement and manage mTLS, certificate lifecycle, workload identity, and secure service-to-service communication frameworks.
• Define and enforce traffic management policies including routing, retries, circuit breaking, and fault injection strategies.
• Integrate service mesh capabilities with ingress, egress, and API gateway layers for unified traffic governance.
• Build and enhance observability for service mesh traffic, including tracing, metrics, topology mapping, and performance monitoring.
• Design scalable multi-cluster and cross-cluster mesh architectures to support high availability and tenant isolation.
• Optimize mesh performance, sidecar efficiency, and control-plane stability using data-driven analysis and continuous tuning.
• Develop adoption frameworks, onboarding documentation, and best practices to enable engineering teams to effectively use the mesh platform.
• Manage upgrades, lifecycle operations, and configuration governance for service mesh components in production environments.
• Partner with SRE, platform, and security teams to troubleshoot incidents and enforce zero-trust networking policies.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 5+ years of experience in platform engineering, SRE, DevOps, or infrastructure-focused roles.
• Hands-on production experience with Istio and/or Linkerd service mesh platforms.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes networking, CNI, ingress/egress, and cloud-native architectures.
• Deep knowledge of Envoy proxy, traffic routing, and distributed system communication patterns.
• Experience with mTLS, PKI, certificate management, and zero-trust security principles.
• Proficiency in observability tooling including distributed tracing, metrics, and logging in microservices environments.
• Programming experience in Go or Python for automation and tooling development.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across networking, application, and infrastructure layers.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to collaborate across engineering, security, and platform teams.

• Competitive salary range of $100,000 to $150,000 per year.
• 100% remote work within the continental United States.
• Long-term, multi-year engagement aligned with enterprise platform initiatives.
• Full-time W2 employment with direct engagement (no third-party arrangements).
• Opportunity to work on large-scale Kubernetes and service mesh production environments.
• Exposure to cutting-edge cloud-native technologies including Istio, Linkerd, and eBPF-based networking trends.
• Strong focus on professional growth in platform engineering and distributed systems.
• Standard benefits package including healthcare, paid time off, and other employer-provided benefits (eligibility dependent).