Lead Kubernetes Engineer

Since 1935, Morgan Stanley is known as a global leader in financial services, always evolving and innovating to better serve our clients and our communities in more than 40 countries around the world. 

Department Profile
Our Technology team is at the forefront of driving technological innovations, increasing operational efficiency, and delivering high-impact projects. We partner closely with our business units to deliver sustainable technology solutions that enable business goals and create lasting value for Morgan Stanley and our clients.

Position Overview

This position is part of the strategic initiative to centralize and streamline the onboarding and integration of applications within the Private Cloud environment, with a special focus on the deployment of both internally developed and vendor applications through Kubernetes. The dedicated resource will play a pivotal role in ensuring that all distributed applications-whether proprietary or third-party-are onboarded efficiently, securely, and in accordance with architectural and operational standards.

• You will be responsible for coordinating with application development and vendor teams as a subject matter expert (SME) to translate business requirements documents (BRD) and software requirement specifications (SRS) into robust, cloud-native infrastructure and architectural patterns. This entails a holistic understanding of both functional and non-functional requirements, including scalability, security, reliability, and performance.
• Application Onboarding : Lead the end-to-end onboarding process for both Wealth Management private cloud applications and vendor solutions into the Kubernetes platform, ensuring alignment with organizational standards and compliance mandates.
• Integration Design : Create comprehensive Kubernetes integration designs, encompassing containerization strategies, network policies, service mesh integration, persistent storage configuration, and cloud resource mapping.
• Configuration and Deployment : Oversee the configuration and deployment of Kubernetes resources, including pods, deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, ConfigMaps, Secrets, Ingress controllers, and custom resource definitions (CRDs). Ensure applications are securely and efficiently released to the private cloud environment.
• Infrastructure Sizing and Optimization: Collaborate with the infrastructure team to finalize resource sizing, autoscaling parameters, and quota management for each application, leveraging tools such as Kubernetes Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, Vertical Pod Autoscaler, and resource requests/limits.
• Artifact Creation: Develop and maintain Helm charts, Kubernetes manifests, CI/CD pipeline templates, and automated deployment scripts. These artifacts will accelerate onboarding and simplify ongoing maintenance and updates across vendor and proprietary applications.
• Tool Enablement: Design and implement tools that facilitate deployment, monitoring, troubleshooting, and lifecycle management for applications within Kubernetes. Integrate with SWAT, performance engineering, and support teams to ensure seamless operation and rapid incident resolution.
• Non-Functional Change Support: Take ownership of non-functional changes including hardware provisioning, network segmentation (firewalls), ALM onboarding, load balancer configuration, secure vault integration, batch processing setup, and Windows/Linux service configurations as applicable.
• Vendor Application Integration: Partner with third-party vendors to containerize and onboard their applications into the private cloud, addressing unique integration challenges and ensuring compliance with internal enterprise policies.
• Level 3 Troubleshooting: Provide advanced troubleshooting expertise during incidents, acting as the escalation point for Kubernetes platform issues, application outages, and performance bottlenecks. Collaborate closely with monitoring and operations teams to restore service and implement long-term fixes. This role demands frequent and effective cross-team collaboration. The Kubernetes Specialist will serve as the technical liaison among development, infrastructure, security, vendor, and operations teams. The resource must translate application requirements into actionable infrastructure tasks, resolve integration blockers, and advocate for best practices in cloud-native application design.

What You will bring to the role

To succeed in the role, you must possess deep expertise across Kubernetes, containerization technologies, and cloud infrastructure. Specific technical competencies include:

• 7+ years of experience working in a similar capacity
• Mastery of Kubernetes constructs, such as namespaces, RBAC, network policies, persistent storage, and service mesh architectures (e.g., Istio, Linkerd).
• Proficient in Helm, Kustomize, and other Kubernetes manifest management tools.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, ideally with platforms like Jenkins, GitLab, or Azure DevOps, specifically tailored for containerized applications.
• Strong scripting skills in Bash, Python, or PowerShell for automation and operational efficiency.
• Hands-on experience with monitoring solutions including Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, and cloud-native APM tools.
• Familiarity with cloud security best practices and integration of secure vaults (e.g., HashiCorp Vault, Azure Key Vault) for secrets management.
• Understanding of load balancing solutions both inside and outside Kubernetes (e.g., Ingress controllers, external LBs).
• Knowledge of networking, firewalls, and secure communication patterns in hybrid cloud architectures.
• Experience with batch processing and integration of Windows/Linux services in Kubernetes.

WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT FROM MORGAN STANLEY:

At Morgan Stanley, we raise, manage and allocate capital for our clients – helping them reach their goals. We do it in a way that’s differentiated – and we’ve done that for 90 years. Our values - putting clients first, doing the right thing, leading with exceptional ideas, committing to diversity and inclusion, and giving back - aren’t just beliefs, they guide the decisions we make every day to do what's best for our clients, communities and more than 80,000 employees in 1,200 offices across 42 countries. At Morgan Stanley, you’ll find an opportunity to work alongside the best and the brightest, in an environment where you are supported and empowered. Our teams are relentless collaborators and creative thinkers, fueled by their diverse backgrounds and experiences. We are proud to support our employees and their families at every point along their work-life journey, offering some of the most attractive and comprehensive employee benefits and perks in the industry. There’s also ample opportunity to move about the business for those who show passion and grit in their work.

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Expected base pay rates for the role will be between $120,000 to $165,000 per year at the commencement of employment. However, base pay if hired will be determined on an individualized basis and is only part of the total compensation package, which, depending on the position, may also include commission earnings, incentive compensation, discretionary bonuses, other short and long-term incentive packages, and other Morgan Stanley sponsored benefit programs.

Morgan Stanley's goal is to build and maintain a workforce that is diverse in experience and background but uniform in reflecting our standards of integrity and excellence. Consequently, our recruiting efforts reflect our desire to attract and retain the best and brightest from all talent pools. We want to be the first choice for prospective employees.

It is the policy of the Firm to ensure equal employment opportunity without discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, age, sex, sex stereotype, gender, gender identity or expression, transgender, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, disability, marital and civil partnership/union status, pregnancy, veteran or military service status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Morgan Stanley is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversifying its workforce (M/F/Disability/Vet).