OpenShift Platform Lead: Architecture & Automation

Smooth Professional; Dubai; On-site; AED 420,000 - 600,000; Full time

Job summary

Smooth Professional seeks a senior OpenShift Platform Engineer in Dubai to own the technical direction of an enterprise OpenShift platform while remaining hands-on. You will lead a team of platform admins, set standards, and partner with application, infrastructure, network, security and DevOps teams to onboard workloads.

You will drive automation, architecture decisions on scale, and resilience planning while fixing outages and documenting runbooks for continuity.

Qualifications

• Around eight years across infrastructure and platform work, with OpenShift and Kubernetes depth.
• 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 outages that taught you something.
• Fluency with automation tooling: Ansible, Terraform, Bash, Python, whichever you reach for.
• Observability, logging, tuning — knowing what to measure before you're asked.
• Resilience planning: availability targets, recovery objectives, capacity ahead of demand.
• A technical degree or equivalent proven the hard way.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for the container estate across environments.
• Build, run and upgrade clusters with hands-on work in the terminal.
• Handle incidents, problem management, patch cycles, backups, recovery testing.
• Make architecture calls on scale, capacity and performance.
• Push automation everywhere — declarative infra, pipeline-driven deployments, Git as source of truth.
• Maintain security: access controls, cert lifecycle, vulnerability remediation before audit.
• Investigate outages and implement proper fixes rather than quick patches.
• Maintain docs, runbooks and standards so others can continue without interruption.
• Report service levels and platform health to non-Kubernetes audiences.
• Share on-call rota and lead response when it counts.
• Lead the team: review designs, coach engineers, and align with architects and PMs.
• Collaborate with app, infra, network, security and DevOps teams to onboard workloads.

Skills

OpenShift

Kubernetes

Leadership

Linux

Networking

Storage

Automation

Terraform

Bash

Python

GitOps

Observability

Recovery planning

Education

Technical degree or equivalent

Tools

Ansible

Terraform

Bash

Python

Git

Argo CD

Job description

Smooth Professional seeks a senior OpenShift Platform Engineer in Dubai to own the technical direction of an enterprise OpenShift platform while remaining hands-on. You will lead a team of platform admins, set standards, and partner with application, infrastructure, network, security and DevOps teams to onboard workloads.

You will drive automation, architecture decisions on scale, and resilience planning while fixing outages and documenting runbooks for continuity.