Career Area:

Engineering

Job Description:

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.

When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other. We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it.

Role Definition

We are seeking an experienced Platform System Architect to define and govern the architecture of an enterprisegrade onprem Kubernetes platform supporting missioncritical and autonomy workloads. This role is responsible for the endtoend architectural vision, longterm evolution, and technical guardrails of the platform across onprem, edge, and airgapped environments.

The Platform System Architect works closely with Platform Technical Leads, SRE, Security, and Application teams to ensure the platform is scalable, resilient, secure, operable, and aligned with business and product needs. This is a senior, handson architectural role with strong influence over platform direction.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the end toend system architecture for the onprem Kubernetes platform.
• Establish and maintain reference architectures, design standards, and architectural guardrails across compute, networking, storage, security, and observability.
• Drive architectural decisions for high availability, scalability, resiliency, fault isolation, and disaster recovery.
• Define the platform technology roadmap, including versioning, lifecycle management, and deprecation strategies.
• Architect Kubernetes cluster topology and platform components to support multisite, onprem, and airgapped deployments.
• Define networking and servicetoservice communication architecture, including CNI, service mesh, ingress/egress, and traffic security models.
• Establish storage and data architecture patterns for stateful workloads and platform services.
• Define the security architecture for identity, access management, certificates, secrets, and image supply chain.
• Specify and govern nonfunctional requirements (NFRs) such as performance, availability, security, scalability, and operability.
• Partner with Technical Leads and SRE teams to ensure architectures are implementable, operable, and supportable at scale.
• Review and approve architecture designs, RFCs, and major technical changes impacting the platform.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and architectural patterns and guide continuous platform evolution.
• Act as the architectural authority for platform integrations with application teams and enterprise systems.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent.
• 12+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or systems engineering roles.
• 7+ years of experience designing and evolving largescale distributed systems.
• 5+ years of experience architecting Kubernetesbased platforms, preferably in onprem or selfmanaged environments.
• Strong foundation in distributed systems, Linux, networking, and storage architecture.
• Proven experience defining architecture standards, reference designs, and technical guardrails.
• Demonstrated ability to balance longterm architectural vision with realworld operational constraints.

Desired Qualifications

• Experience designing platforms for airgapped, disconnected, or edge environments.
• Deep familiarity with enterprise Kubernetes ecosystems, including: Service mesh architectures
• Softwaredefined storage
• Observability and monitoring platforms
• Platform security and zerotrust models
• Experience operating in a Platform + SRE shared responsibility model.
• Background in industrial, autonomy, or missioncritical systems.
• Prior experience influencing platform direction across multiple teams or products.

Posting Dates:

March 11, 2026 - March 24, 2026

Caterpillar is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants of any age are encouraged to apply

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