Cloud and RedHat OpenShift Platform Engineer

All the relevant skills, qualifications and experience that a successful applicant will need are listed in the following description.

Reports To: Global Head of Infrastructure

Remuneration: £60k-£70k based on demonstrable experience. Package also includes company pension, health and bonus.

Our client also offers:

• A commitment to your personal development, allowing you to grow with the company.
• Training and development to improve your skills including internal team mentorship programs.
• A professional, friendly, inclusive workplace.

Location: Home based. Hybrid to Leeds if preferred. Some travel to client premises may be required if specific need is identified.

Main Purpose

Our client is a world-leading consortium of asset management organizations specializing in IBM Maximo® EAM, with a strong emphasis on cloud solutions, mobile technology, professional services, and exceptional personalized support. They have identified a requirement for a Cloud and RedHat OpenShift Engineer to join their Global Cloud Services (GCS) Team with a passion for working with innovative cloud technologies, containerized hosting environments and public cloud platform engineering. This engineer will be charged mainly with building RedHat OpenShift clusters using the OpenShift portal as well as hosted client environments within those clusters, using Ansible and build automation through GitHub AWX (formally Ansible Tower). Other responsibilities include incident support and patching/maintenance for the OpenShift platform estate.

Our client uses RedHat Openshift clusters and containerized environments to host (primarily) the IBM Maximo® Application Suite – MAS9 (an Enterprise Asset Management application set), as well as DB2 databases and other IBM and RedHat products. Any experience in any of these technologies would be a major advantage and candidates should indicate this at all levels of application and interview.

Specific Responsibilities:

• Carry out the building of RedHat OpenShift clusters and the establishment of new OpenShift portals to pre-determined specifications;
• Demonstrable use of Ansible (or similar) and GitHub AWX (formally Ansible Tower – or similar) to carry out these builds;
• Ability to work with pre-defined specifications and build standards set at global scope;
• Ability to put forward suggested changes, enhancements and improvements to Ansible scripting, or to write new pieces of automation scripting to meet new build requirements as and if required, working through a clearly-defined structure of Change and Release Management;
• Carry out builds of database platforms either in-cluster or external (using pre-defined scripting);
• Set up backup regimes and other configuration for database platforms to templated standards;
• Carry out builds of client hosted environments within the as-built clusters to pre-determined specifications;
• Set up monitoring and alerting to templated standards using pre-defined toolsets;
• Demonstrable experience with AWS and/or Azure public cloud platforms (preferably both) – with real-world experience in standing up and configuring new estate and VMs, VPNs, firewalls and cloud security distributions, load balancers, networking appliances, alerts and monitoring;
• To respond to incidents as required (as a third-line escalation and consultative Subject Matter Expert in OpenShift and the architecture) – and to undertake investigative and diagnostic processes, formulate and execute action plans, and work in teams to progress incidents to resolution;
• Undertake patching, upgrades, and the application of fix patches and infosec security patches; to all component elements of the OpenShift cluster and its associated platforms, middleware and databases;
• Identify, recommend, and implement upgrades and enhancements required to maintain system functionality, optimal performance, required security versions and vendor support;
• Work with the global security teams to undertake constant and ongoing security scanning using CNAPP security toolsets designed for containerised environments, and take part in the regular global meetings to review vulnerabilities and cloud posture score;
• Work with the global infrastructure teams (being the BAU and innovation teams) – to ensure that global methods, processes and standards are used and upheld, developed and implemented, and that no processes, tooling or methods outside the global standards are employed;
• Work with service management teams to provide them with information and technical support/backing as they interface with the clients on large projects;
• Take part in Disaster Recovery testing and contributing to the reporting of the results.

Required Skills/Technologies:

• IBM RedHat OpenShift containerisation platform and technologies;
• Serverless architectures and experience with cloud-native toolsets designed for immutable infrastructure;
• Public cloud platform engineering skills - preferably AWS and Azure (preferably both) - to include stand up, implementation and build experience – directly within the public cloud platform portals as well as via the OpenShift cluster;
• Ability to demonstrate knowledge of the AWS Well-Architected framework and its real-world application.
• Experience working with AWS as well as Azure networking tools and services and the best practice architecture of networking design within public cloud platforms (primarily for security best design);
• Experience setting up and configuring database managed services within public cloud platforms (such as AWS RDS and Azure Database), and connecting build application layers to these services.
• Real-world or demonstrable experience with infrastructure builds for IBM Maximo® Application Suite, IBM Maximo® Manage, IBM RedHat Openshift Portal, IBM Maximo® 7.6, IBM Websphere would be a distinct advantage, but full and complete training will be offered with any of these technologies for the right candidate looking to learn, including potentially opportunities to become formally accredited;
• Real-world or demonstrable experience with IBM DB2 preferably and also SQL Server a distinct advantage;
• Experience configuring and engineering SSO: SAML, LDAP, SCIM;
• Infrastructure as code experience – preferably Ansible but also Terraform, Chef, Puppet, AWS Cloudformation, Azure Resource Manager, Google Cloud Deployment Manager etc;
• Configuration management experience – preferably Ansible but also Chef, Puppet etc;
• Source control and CMDB – preferably GitHub and Azure DevOps but also SVN, Jira, Confluence;
• Linux environment experience – Debian-based, Red-Hat based;
• Cybersecurity practises and frameworks – notably demonstrable experience with ISO27001, SOC1/2, CyberEssentials+ and/or the NCSC 14 Principles of Cyber Security.

Person Specification:

• Team player; our client offers a team-centric culture/environment;
• Ability to bring discernment, initiative, self-decision skills within remit – this is not a work package provider role;
• Ability to write strong and concise technical documentation to add to and improve the GIFT technical library;
• Ability to troubleshoot, diagnose, replicate-simulate-quantify, triage and investigate technical issues and problems, and the ability to identify root causal factors;
• Professional and committed, able to work unsupervised for task completion, disciplined, organised;
• This role does not involve any line management responsibilities but applicants that enjoy playing a mentoring role to others or bringing others up to technical grade within the team will be developed, encouraged and rewarded;
• Empathic to colleagues and service requestors and willing to be as helpful as possible in a service provision role where customers are internal as well as external;
• This is not primarily a client-facing role, but applicants that are comfortable with dealing directly with clients who can explain technical issues to client end users may be asked to assist in this regard from time to time, and even take part in client meetings alongside in-country technical management;
• Ability to succeed working in virtual teams with colleagues on the other side of the world.