Senior Platform Engineer - Edge, OpenShift & Linux

Location

Australia-wide

Work Site

Remote

Employment Type

Full-Time (Permanent)

Closing Date

23 Oct, 2026

Senior Platform Engineer - Edge, OpenShift & Linux

Kestrel Eight is an Australian owned consultancy working in platform engineering, infrastructure modernisation and integration. We are a Red Hat Advanced Partner and an IBM Silver Partner, and we deliver with senior Australian practitioners who are named and profiled before a client commits. The person a client meets is the person who turns up.

Our clients run distributed estates in retail, critical infrastructure, finance, health and government. Simplifying complexity, scaling with confidence.

Apply Now

The role

You will work inside client environments as the senior engineer on their Linux and container platform, usually embedded with a small internal team who know their business well and need depth they cannot hire fast enough.

The work is fleet work. Estates of hundreds to thousands of nodes spread across sites that range from large facilities with proper network capacity to small branches on constrained links in regional areas. The problem is rarely a single build. It is making every site consistent, current and patched without a truck roll and without breaking a site that nobody can attend in person.

You will be the person who turns that into code.

What you will do

• Set the standard build and reference pattern for RHEL and OpenShift at the edge, including when to retire older architectures and how to move a team onto container native footprints such as RHEL CoreOS and single node OpenShift.
• Make edge environments consumable as code through Terraform, Ansible and GitOps, so a site build is repeatable rather than hand assembled.
• Own the CI/CD pipelines behind image factory builds, automated testing and fleet wide patch orchestration across both the host OS and the container platform.
• Design update strategies that suit the network, including staged rollouts and incremental rather than full image updates where bandwidth or site conditions demand it.
• Work with client security teams to turn compliance requirements such as CIS benchmarks for Linux and Kubernetes into automated remediation rather than a spreadsheet of findings.
• Use client telemetry to find the parts of a fleet consuming the most operational effort, and remove that effort in code.

What you will bring

• 7 or more years in infrastructure or software engineering, with at least 2 to 3 years in a platform architecture or platform product role covering edge computing or container platforms.
• Deep working knowledge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Kubernetes, with scripting in Bash, Python or Go.
• Hands on experience with distributed edge deployments, container runtime management and hybrid control planes such as Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management.
• Demonstrated experience moving a team from console driven administration to code based deployment using Terraform, Ansible and GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD.
• Practical understanding of what distributed sites do to a platform design: constrained links, capacity planning at branch scale, and sites that cannot be rebuilt in person.
• DevSecOps practice, including container image scanning and policy as code inside the deployment pipeline.
• The judgement to balance application teams who want speed against security and operations teams who want stability, and to justify a platform investment with data rather than preference.
• Comfort working in Jira against a real backlog, and writing the documentation the client keeps after you leave.

Well Regarded

• A degree in computer science or equivalent.
• Certification such as RHCE, EX280, CKA or CKS.

What we offer

Permanent employment with an Australian consultancy, not a placement through a recruitment funnel. You are a named practitioner on our bench, profiled to clients by your actual experience.

The role is remote and open to candidates anywhere in Australia, with travel to client sites as engagements require. Senior delivery oversight sits behind every engagement, so you are supported rather than dropped into a client and left to it. You will work across more than one client and more than one vendor stack over time, which keeps the work varied and the skills current.

Role Details

Detail Value Rate Discussed on application. Rate and package reflect seniority, clearance and engagement type Term Permanent, full-time employment with Kestrel Eight, working across more than one client and more than one vendor stack over time Location Remote, Australia-wide. Travel to client sites, including metropolitan and regional locations, as engagements require Start ASAP Clearance Baseline, NV1 or NV2 security clearance is an advantage. Some of our engagements are with Australian government clients and require Australian citizenship and a current clearance

How to Apply

Send a CV and a short note on the largest fleet you have automated. We respond to every applicant.

Apply Now

Kestrel Eight is an Australian IT advisory and delivery firm. We place senior, locally based practitioners into enterprise and government programs across delivery, architecture, integration and platform modernisation.

Location

Australia-wide

Work Site

Remote

Employment Type

Full-Time (Permanent)

Closing Date

23 Oct, 2026

Senior Platform Engineer - Edge, OpenShift & Linux

Kestrel Eight is an Australian owned consultancy working in platform engineering, infrastructure modernisation and integration. We are a Red Hat Advanced Partner and an IBM Silver Partner, and we deliver with senior Australian practitioners who are named and profiled before a client commits. The person a client meets is the person who turns up.

Our clients run distributed estates in retail, critical infrastructure, finance, health and government. Simplifying complexity, scaling with confidence.

Apply Now

The role

You will work inside client environments as the senior engineer on their Linux and container platform, usually embedded with a small internal team who know their business well and need depth they cannot hire fast enough.

The work is fleet work. Estates of hundreds to thousands of nodes spread across sites that range from large facilities with proper network capacity to small branches on constrained links in regional areas. The problem is rarely a single build. It is making every site consistent, current and patched without a truck roll and without breaking a site that nobody can attend in person.

You will be the person who turns that into code.

What you will do

• Set the standard build and reference pattern for RHEL and OpenShift at the edge, including when to retire older architectures and how to move a team onto container native footprints such as RHEL CoreOS and single node OpenShift.
• Make edge environments consumable as code through Terraform, Ansible and GitOps, so a site build is repeatable rather than hand assembled.
• Own the CI/CD pipelines behind image factory builds, automated testing and fleet wide patch orchestration across both the host OS and the container platform.
• Design update strategies that suit the network, including staged rollouts and incremental rather than full image updates where bandwidth or site conditions demand it.
• Work with client security teams to turn compliance requirements such as CIS benchmarks for Linux and Kubernetes into automated remediation rather than a spreadsheet of findings.
• Use client telemetry to find the parts of a fleet consuming the most operational effort, and remove that effort in code.

What you will bring

• 7 or more years in infrastructure or software engineering, with at least 2 to 3 years in a platform architecture or platform product role covering edge computing or container platforms.
• Deep working knowledge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Kubernetes, with scripting in Bash, Python or Go.
• Hands on experience with distributed edge deployments, container runtime management and hybrid control planes such as Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management.
• Demonstrated experience moving a team from console driven administration to code based deployment using Terraform, Ansible and GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD.
• Practical understanding of what distributed sites do to a platform design: constrained links, capacity planning at branch scale, and sites that cannot be rebuilt in person.
• DevSecOps practice, including container image scanning and policy as code inside the deployment pipeline.
• The judgement to balance application teams who want speed against security and operations teams who want stability, and to justify a platform investment with data rather than preference.
• Comfort working in Jira against a real backlog, and writing the documentation the client keeps after you leave.

Well Regarded

• A degree in computer science or equivalent.
• Certification such as RHCE, EX280, CKA or CKS.

What we offer

Permanent employment with an Australian consultancy, not a placement through a recruitment funnel. You are a named practitioner on our bench, profiled to clients by your actual experience.

The role is remote and open to candidates anywhere in Australia, with travel to client sites as engagements require. Senior delivery oversight sits behind every engagement, so you are supported rather than dropped into a client and left to it. You will work across more than one client and more than one vendor stack over time, which keeps the work varied and the skills current.

Role Details

Detail Value Rate Discussed on application. Rate and package reflect seniority, clearance and engagement type Term Permanent, full-time employment with Kestrel Eight, working across more than one client and more than one vendor stack over time Location Remote, Australia-wide. Travel to client sites, including metropolitan and regional locations, as engagements require Start ASAP Clearance Baseline, NV1 or NV2 security clearance is an advantage. Some of our engagements are with Australian government clients and require Australian citizenship and a current clearance

How to Apply

Send a CV and a short note on the largest fleet you have automated. We respond to every applicant.

Apply Now

Kestrel Eight is an Australian IT advisory and delivery firm. We place senior, locally based practitioners into enterprise and government programs across delivery, architecture, integration and platform modernisation.