Platform Lead - Openshift

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

You'll own the technical direction of an enterprise Open Shift 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 Open Shift 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 Dev Ops 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 Open Shift 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 Git Ops 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 Open Shift administration certification Exposure to service mesh, operators, cluster management and security tooling, Argo CDPlatforms serving multiple business units rather than a single application team