<>Job Description Principal Golang Architect Location: Menlo Park, CA Duration: 12 Month Contract Visa: Independent Visa excluding OPT Position Overview: We are looking for a highly specialized Principal Cloud-Native Architect with strong hands-on expertise in Golang, Kubernetes, AWS, EKS(Elastic Kubernetes Service), and distributed systems. Please submit candidates who have built and architected enterprise-scale cloud-native platforms not candidates with only application deployment or basic Kubernetes administration experience. Must-Have Skills: 12+ years overall software/IT experience. Strong hands-on Golang/Go development and Architecture. Strong experience with Docker, Helm, CI/CD, GitOps and infrastructure automation. Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry or enterprise observability. Agentic AI, RAG, MCP/LLM integration with cloud-native platforms is Required. Expert-level Kubernetes engineering. Hands-on Kubernetes Operators, Controllers, CRDs, Kubebuilder, Controller-Runtime/Operator SDK. Strong AWS / EKS architecture experience. Enterprise distributed systems and microservices architecture. Experience with Kubernetes multi-cluster / federation is highly preferred. Strong understanding of scalability, resiliency, fault tolerance, high availability and production troubleshooting. Istio/Envoy, Kafka, Terraform, ArgoCD are strongly preferred. <>Pre-Screening Questions Q1: Does the candidate have strong hands-on experience developing and architecting enterprise-scale applications/platforms using Golang (Go), Kubernetes, and cloud-native technologies, rather than only application deployment or basic Kubernetes administration? Q2: Does the candidate have hands-on expert-level Kubernetes engineering experience, including Operators, Controllers, CRDs, Kubebuilder, Controller-Runtime, or Operator SDK? Q3: Does the candidate have hands-on experience architecting AWS/EKS-based enterprise distributed systems and microservices, including scalability, resiliency, fault tolerance, high availability, and production troubleshooting? Q4: Does the candidate have hands-on experience integrating Agentic AI, RAG, MCP, or LLM-based capabilities with cloud-native platforms or distributed systems?