We are seeking an experienced RHEL Engineer to provide technical expertise and advisory support for a leading financial services customer. This role will focus on modernizing and automating operating system security, patching, and upgrade processes to improve the speed, consistency, and frequency of vulnerability remediation.

The RHEL Engineer will serve as a technical lead in identifying opportunities for automation, designing and implementing CI/CD components, and developing more efficient workflows for OS patching and upgrades. This person will help bridge the gap between the customer’s current-state architecture and a modern, automated approach to system maintenance and security.

This is a 16-month contract requiring approximately 35 hours per week. Due to the customer’s location in London, the engineer must be able to start work as early as 6:00 AM EST to provide sufficient overlap with the customer’s team.

The position is expected to start ASAP, pending completion of the customer’s background check, fingerprinting, financial disclosure requirements, and onboarding process, which typically takes 4–6 weeks.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy & Architecture Design:

• Conduct solutions design sessions to identify current upgrade pain points.
• Assist the Customer with identifying automation opportunities and designing and documenting future state patching / upgrade processes.

Automation & Execution:

• Develop automation to improve the speed and reliability of certification and distribution of kernel/OS config snapshots.
• Investigating Kpatch and identifying opportunities to use it as an even faster route to deploy in some scenarios.
• Develop and refine automation playbooks for snapshot, upgrade, rollback, and patching commit tasks.
• Execute the patching / upgrade workflow and troubleshoot alongside Red Hat Engineering teams.
• Refine automation processes to support diverse system types across the infrastructure.

Validation & Documentation:

• Create and maintain a standard RHEL patching / upgrade workflow (pre-analysis, remediation, snapshot, validation, rollback, and commit).
• Build a knowledge-base for the in-place upgrade process for internal release.
• Technical Oversight & Facilitation:
• Facilitate workshops to fill technical knowledge gaps and capture upgrade dependencies.
• Identify beta users and test/validate the upgrade process at scale.
• Provide weekly status reports to the Red Hat Project Manager to ensure transparency on project status, risks, and decision-making.

Required Qualifications & Skills

• Proven 10+ years of experience with RHEL deployments, hardening, and operations.
• Proven understanding of CI/CD pipelines and engagement experience with automating processes to accelerate deployment timelines.
• Strong proficiency in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) and building automation workflows.
• Understanding of Kpatch and applicable use cases
• Strong proficiency in Python
• Ability to facilitate technical workshops and lead architectural decision-making.
• Experience in creating technical documentation and knowledge-base assets.
• Strong troubleshooting capabilities, including coordination with vendor engineering teams.
• Experience in managing technical scope and communicating progress to executive stakeholders.