About the ICRC
Since 1863, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has worked to relieve suffering and preserve human dignity during war and armed violence. Alongside our Red Cross and Red Crescent partners, we deliver life-saving aid across front lines and strive to reconnect families and locate missing people.
Engaging with authorities and armed forces on all sides, often confidentially, we advocate for humane treatment of detainees and urge compliance with international humanitarian law to protect civilians from harm, including online.
Purpose of the Role
The ICRC is seeking a highly experienced Kubernetes Tech Lead to own, evolve, and operate its container orchestration platform in support of the ICRC's mandate to protect and assist victims of armed conflict and other situations of violence.
As the technical backbone of the ICRC's Kubernetes practice, this role is responsible for designing resilient, secure, and scalable cluster infrastructure serving both global digital services and field-facing humanitarian applications, including deployments in some of the most operationally demanding environments in the world.
The Kubernetes Tech Lead will set platform standards, lead a platform, and collaborate closely with application teams to ensure workloads run reliably across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Main Duties & Responsibilities
- Own the full lifecycle of ICRC's Kubernetes clusters (design, provisioning, upgrades, capacity planning, and decommissioning) across cloud and on-premises environments.
- Define and enforce cluster architecture standards, including multi-tenancy models, namespace governance, RBAC policies, network segmentation, and pod security standards.
- Lead the design and operation of cluster networking, covering CNI selection and configuration (Calico, Cilium), Ingress controllers, and DNS management.
- Architect and manage persistent storage strategies, including CSI drivers, distributed storage (Rook/Ceph, Longhorn), StorageClasses, StatefulSet patterns, and backup and restore workflows.
- Build and maintain GitOps delivery pipelines using ArgoCD for continuous deployment of workloads and cluster configuration.
- Operate and maintain observability stacks covering cluster and workload monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana), logging (Loki), and distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry).
- Support AI/ML platform workloads, including GPU scheduling (NVIDIA device plugin, MIG partitioning), batch pipelines (Argo Workflows, Kubeflow), and inference services.
- Collaborate with product owners, software engineers, and DevOps and AI/ML teams to support diverse workload types, including application, batch processing, and AI services (GPU and inferencing).
- Establish and champion Kubernetes best practices, internal runbooks, and training programmes across engineering teams.
- Stay current with the latest advancements in Kubernetes ecosystem technologies, trends, and best practices.
Education & Professional Background
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
- Kubernetes certifications (CKA, CKAD, CKS) are strongly desired; Agile/SAFe certification is a plus.
- 7+ years in infrastructure or platform engineering, with at least 4 years of deep, hands-on Kubernetes expertise in production environments.
- Proven experience managing multi-cluster, multi-cloud, or hybrid Kubernetes environments at scale.
- Proven ability to design and implement zero-downtime cluster upgrades and large-scale migrations.
- Experience operating databases on Kubernetes or OpenShift (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MariaDB/MySQL) is an asset.
- Contribution to open-source Kubernetes ecosystem projects or CNCF landscape tools is an asset.
- Experience in a complex, diverse, and international environment is a plus.
Skills & Competencies
- Solid understanding of cluster architecture (Control Plane, API Server), networking (CNI, Network Policies, Ingress, Gateway, DNS), storage (PVC, CSI, Ceph, Longhorn, S3), security (RBAC, security standards, image scanning, secret management), and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry).
- GitOps mindset with hands-on experience using ArgoCD, Kustomize, and Helm.
- Strong scripting and automation skills across Azure DevOps Pipelines, Ansible, Python, and Bash/Shell.
- Strong proficiency in Go or Python for platform tooling and custom controller development.
- Familiarity with GPU workload scheduling (NVIDIA device plugin, MIG partitioning) for AI/ML use cases.
- Proven API design and integration experience across heterogeneous systems and partners.
- Knowledge of data privacy regulations.
- Strong written and spoken English is required; French is a plus.
Additional Information
- Location: Geneva
- Type of contract: Open-ended
- Activity rate: 100%
- Start date: September/October 2026
- Recruiter: Alejandra Rodriguez
- Application deadline: Monday, 13th of July 2026
Important information: For future employees and their dependents who are not EU and/or EFTA nationals, settling in Switzerland is now required. Direct settlement in France upon arrival is no longer possible.
Our Values
At the ICRC, we value impact, collaboration, respect, and compassion. We seek candidates who demonstrate behaviors based on these shared values. For more information on the ICRC values, please visit this page.
Are you ready to explore the next chapter of your career? Apply now!
