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