OpenShift Architect​/SME

Hello Kindred are specialists in staffing marketing, creative and technology roles, offering a range of talent solutions that can be delivered on-site, remotely or hybrid.

Our vision is to make work accessible and people’s lives better.

We do this by disrupting traditional employment barriers –connecting ambitious talent to flexible opportunities with trusted brands.

Anticipated Contract End Date/Length: November 30, 2026
Work set up: Hybrid

Our client in the Information Technology and Services industry is looking for an Open Shift Architect / SME to join the Virtualization Engineering Team within Distributed Compute in CTO Enterprise Services. The Open Shift Engineering SME is responsible for designing, building, operating, and continuously improving the enterprise Open Shift platform for critical business services. This role owns platform reliability, lifecycle management, security hardening, automation, and integration with core enterprise services, acting as the technical authority for Open Shift architecture and operations.

What you will do:

• Own Open Shift cluster lifecycle including Day 0 provisioning, Day 1 configuration, and Day 2 operations.
• Plan and execute platform upgrades, patching, and version compatibility management across OCP, RHCOS, and Operators.
• Design, build, and continuously improve enterprise Open Shift architecture.
• Implement and maintain platform security controls including RBAC, SCC, network policies, image governance, and compliance baselines.
• Build and maintain automation using Ansible, Git Ops tools such as ArgoCD and Open Shift Git Ops, and Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform or Open Tofu.
• Manage and optimise Open Shift networking including OVN-Kubernetes, Multus, ingress, egress, and load balancer integrations.
• Manage storage integration and lifecycle including Storage Class configuration, CSI drivers, provisioning, and performance tuning.
• Integrate Open Shift with enterprise services including DNS, NTP, LDAP, Active Directory, OIDC, PKI certificates, monitoring, logging, and Service Now.
• Define observability standards, SLOs, alerting thresholds, and incident response playbooks.
• Lead root cause analysis for platform incidents and drive preventative actions to improve reliability.
• Support capacity planning, scaling strategy, and platform performance optimisation.
• Partner with application, security, network, and infrastructure teams to enable secure and efficient onboarding.
• Manage vendor engagement including alignment with Red Hat TAM, support case management, and escalation handling.
• Create and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, standards, and knowledge transfer materials.
• Mentor engineering teams and establish best practices for platform operations and governance.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver infrastructure solutions aligned to business needs.
• Participate in disaster recovery and business continuity planning and testing.
• Engage stakeholders to communicate issues, progress, risks, and resolutions for critical incidents.
• Monitor compliance and mitigate risks while ensuring adherence to regulatory standards and internal policies.
• Manage and improve platform offerings throughout their lifecycle using Agile methodologies.
• Share product updates, ensure supported version compliance, and communicate CVEs promptly.
• Provide technical direction across Open Shift, distributed systems, servers, and storage technologies.
• Represent the team during major incidents and provide technical expertise in crisis situations.
• Implement robust monitoring and alerting systems to proactively manage platform health.
• Ensure system availability and performance in line with defined SLAs and SLOs.
• Plan future capacity requirements and optimise system performance through tuning and scaling activities.

• Bachelor’s degree, Diploma,
  
  B.E,
  
  B.Tech, M.Tech, or M.Sc in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Minimum twelve years of experience in Linux or platform engineering, with at least three years of hands‑on Open Shift or Kubernetes operations in enterprise environments.
• Proven experience operating production…