Platform Lead - Openshift

You'll own the technical direction of an enterprise OpenShift 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 OpenShift 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 DevOps 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 OpenShift 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 GitOps 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 OpenShift administration certification
• Exposure to service mesh, operators, cluster management and security tooling, Argo CD
• Platforms serving multiple business units rather than a single application team