Senior Cloud Engineer - Azure/OpenShift

Thinkahead; United States; Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance

401(k)

Paid time off

Paid parental and caregiver leave

Job summary

Thinkahead is seeking a Senior Cloud Engineer to lead cloud operations for customer environments. You'll be responsible for managing production OpenShift platforms and improving service quality across public clouds like Azure and AWS.

The ideal candidate has extensive experience in cloud operations with strong troubleshooting skills and a background in customer support. This role includes mentorship responsibilities, and a culture of belonging is emphasized at Thinkahead.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in customer-facing IT infrastructure or cloud operations.
• Strong expertise in Azure and OpenShift environments.
• Ability to troubleshoot and solve complex issues effectively.

Responsibilities

• Lead support and operation of cloud infrastructure.
• Own complex incidents and escalations.
• Plan and execute operational changes.

Skills

Cloud operations

Incident management

OpenShift

Automation

Kubernetes

Education

5+ years in IT infrastructure

Relevant cloud certifications

Tools

PowerShell

Python

Terraform

Job description

AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together advances in cloud infrastructure, automation and analytics, and software delivery, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation.

At AHEAD, we prioritize creating a culture of belonging, where all perspectives and voices are represented, valued, respected, and heard. We create spaces to empower everyone to speak up, make change, and drive the culture at AHEAD.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and do not discriminate based on an individual's race, national origin, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, marital status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law, whether actual or perceived.

We embrace all candidates that will contribute to the diversification and enrichment of ideas and perspectives at AHEAD.

Senior Cloud Engineer – Managed Services

The Senior Cloud Engineer – Managed Services is responsible for leading the day-to-day operation, administration, monitoring, support, and continuous improvement of customer cloud environments, including production Red Hat OpenShift (Kubernetes) platforms, across public Clouds such as Azure, AWS, GCP or OCI. This role is primarily focused on advanced cloud operations, ITSM execution, customer advisory, mentorship, and operational improvement, with secondary exposure to automation, DevOps, and reliability practices where they improve consistency, scale, and service quality. The role is expected to independently own complex and high‑risk operational work, serve as a senior escalation point for major incidents and changes, and partner with architects on major design or platform engineering decisions as appropriate. There is an expectation of some travel and after‑hours/weekend support in the event of major outages/issues, or when requested by the client for change windows (or similar events).

Responsibilities

• Lead the support and operation of cloud infrastructure, platform services, identity, networking, security controls, and operational tooling across customer environments.
• Able to architect and lead deployment of moderately complex solutions related to cloud solutions.
• Understands performance, scaling and functional characteristics of software technologies.
• Ability to understand open‑source and cloud use‑cases and recommend standard design patterns commonly used in such solutions (best practices).
• Own complex incidents, escalations, and problem investigations; perform advanced troubleshooting, coordination, service restoration, and follow‑through durable resolution.
• Plan and execute complex changes and recurring operational activities including provisioning, access changes, maintenance events, backup and recovery validation, patching coordination, and platform hygiene.
• Serve as a senior escalation point within the on‑call rotation for major incidents, high‑impact issues, and customer‑approved after‑hours change activity.
• Follow and reinforce established ITSM processes for incident, request, change, problem, escalation, documentation, and customer‑facing status communication.
• Develop and maintain runbooks, SOPs, standards, knowledge articles, and technical documentation that improve consistency and service quality.
• Mentor other Cloud Engineers, review work for quality and completeness, and provide technical guidance on operational best practices.
• Drive monitoring, alerting, logging, tagging, policy, compliance, and cost‑visibility improvements that strengthen managed cloud operations.
• Use scripting, automation, and AI to reduce repetitive effort, improve consistency, and scale service delivery.
• General familiarity with DevOps/SRE tooling is required but is not the primary emphasis of the role.
• Participate in customer meetings, service reviews, and advisory discussions; translate technical issues, risk, and improvement opportunities into clear business‑facing communication.
• Operate and support Red Hat OpenShift (Kubernetes) clusters in production, including cluster health, upgrades, scaling, and lifecycle management.
• Manage OpenShift access and security controls, including RBAC, SCCs, NetworkPolicies, secrets management, and certificate/ingress considerations.
• Troubleshoot platform and workload issues across Kubernetes/OpenShift constructs (nodes, operators, routes/ingress, services, deployments, pods, persistent volumes) and coordinate remediation with application, network, and security teams.
• Implement and validate platform backup, restore, and disaster recovery procedures (e.g., etcd, cluster resources, and persistent data) in accordance with customer requirements.
• Support platform automation and standardization efforts using infrastructure as code and GitOps practices (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, Helm, Argo CD) to improve repeatability and reduce operational risk.
• Define and improve observability for cloud and OpenShift platforms (metrics, logs, traces), tune alerting to reduce noise, and contribute to availability, performance, and capacity planning.
• Other job duties as assigned.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in customer‑facing IT infrastructure, cloud operations, systems administration, or managed services support, including work in production environments.
• Strong operational expertise in at least one major cloud platform, with the ability to lead complex support and administration activities in Azure.
• Experience with other clouds such as GCP, AWS, and OCI is a strong preference.
• Minimum 3+ years of experience supporting a production OpenShift environment (on‑prem, ROSA, ARO, etc.).
• Experience leading complex incidents, escalations, change execution, and problem investigations in production environments.
• Experience with Windows and/or Linux server operations, networking fundamentals, identity and access management, monitoring, governance, and operational documentation.
• Experience in a managed services, consulting, or multi‑customer support environment, ideally supporting complex enterprise customers.
• Strong working knowledge of PowerShell, Python, Bash, infrastructure as code, automation, CI/CD, or related platform tooling used to improve cloud operations.
• Relevant advanced cloud, operations, or platform certifications are a plus.
• Advanced troubleshooting, operational execution, and issue ownership skills in live production environments.
• Preferred certifications: Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration (or Red Hat Certified OpenShift Administrator), Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA), Kubernetes certifications (CKA/CKAD), along with AWS/Azure certifications.
• Strong customer‑facing verbal and written communication skills for technical, operational, and advisory conversations.
• Experience and ability to “jump on a whiteboard” in front of a customer to develop a solution to a business / technology goal or challenge.
• Participate in pre‑sales activities including scoping, positioning, technology adoption and maturation.
• Strong documentation discipline, attention to detail, well organized, and respect for change control, service quality, and operational process.
• Strong working knowledge of identity and access management, RBAC, least privilege, networking fundamentals, security controls, governance, and monitoring concepts.
• Working knowledge of incident, request, change, problem, major incident, and escalation management in a managed services environment.
• Ability to mentor others, review technical work, promote standards, and contribute to continuous service improvement.
• Familiarity with source control, pipelines, infrastructure as code, observability, and related DevOps/SRE concepts as supporting capabilities rather than the primary focus of the role.

Compensation

The compensation range indicated in this posting reflects the On‑Target Earnings (“OTE”) for this role, which includes a base salary and any applicable target bonus amount. This OTE range may vary based on the candidate’s relevant experience, qualifications, and geographic location.

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
• 401(k)
• Paid company holidays
• Paid time off
• Paid parental and caregiver leave
• Plus more! See benefits for additional details.