You'll own the technical direction of an enterprise Open Shift platform and stay hands-on while you do it. This is not a people-management-only role. A significant part of your week goes on platform engineering, troubleshooting, architecture and automation; the rest goes on leading a team of Open Shift administrators and setting the standards they work to.
The work Set and hold the technical direction for the container estate across every environment Build, run and upgrade clusters — with your hands on the terminal, not just approving the change request Keep the lights on: incidents, problem management, patch cycles, backups, recovery testing Make the architecture calls on scale, capacity and where performance breaks down Push automation everywhere — declarative infrastructure, pipeline-driven deployments, Git as the source of truth Hold the security line: access controls, cert lifecycle, closing off vulnerabilities before audit finds them Dig into what actually caused the big outages and fix it properly rather than papering over it Keep documentation, runbooks and standards in a state where someone else could pick them up Report on service levels and platform health to people who don't speak Kubernetes Share the on-call rota and lead the response when it counts
Leading the team Run the day-to-day for a team of platform administrators Review what the team designs and ships before it reaches production Coach engineers up — technically, not just through a development plan Work alongside application, infrastructure, network, security and Dev Ops teams to get workloads onboarded and running Agree priorities with architects, project managers and the wider business
What you'll bring Around eight years across infrastructure and platform work, with a similar depth on Open Shift and Kubernetes specifically Experience leading engineers, formally or as the person others defer to technically Real command of the stack underneath — Linux, networking, storage, container runtimes Production experience at enterprise scale, including the failures that taught you something Fluency with automation tooling: Ansible, Terraform, Bash, Python, whichever you reach for Pipeline and Git Ops practices used in anger, not in a proof of concept Observability, logging, tuning — knowing what to measure before you're asked Resilience planning: availability targets, recovery objectives, capacity ahead of demand A degree in a technical discipline, or the equivalent proven the hard way
Useful, not essential Red Hat Open Shift administration certification Exposure to service mesh, operators, cluster management and security tooling, Argo CDPlatforms serving multiple business units rather than a single application team