Job Summary

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior RHEL Engineer to provide technical expertise to a financial services customer, executing in-place RHEL upgrades and automating OS security and patching processes.

In this role, you will lead the strategy and execution of identifying, designing, and automating CI/CD components to accelerate patching and upgrade timelines. You will act as the technical lead, bridging the gap between current state architecture and a modern, automated upgrade workflow. This is a remote engagement approximately 1700 hours with the potential for extension.

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:
• Execute RHEL in-place upgrades across RHEL 7, 8, 9 & 10
• 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.
• 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 15+ 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 Shell and Batch scripting
• 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.
• This role requires a background check, fingerprinting and onboarding process which typically takes 4-6 weeks. The start date is dependent on completion of these requirements.