Proficiency in Go and experience building production-grade operators or controllers Hands-on experience with Kubernetes internals, custom resources, and cloud-managed Kubernetes services (EKS, GKE, AKS) Understanding of database deployment patterns, backup/restore, replication, and high availability Familiarity with consensus protocols, failure scenarios, and designing for resilience Experience with cloud-native deployment tooling, IaC (Terraform, Pulumi), and cloud provider APIs Track record of building reliable, observable, and maintainable systems