OpenShift / OCP SME - Lead Engineer

Outstanding long-term contract opportunity! A well-known Financial Services Company is looking for a Lead/Senior OpenShift DevOps Engineer in Charlotte, NC, Chandler, AZ. or Irving, TX (hybrid 3 days on-site).
We are seeking a highly experienced Lead/Senior OpenShift Engineer to guide the operational reliability, governance, and performance of our Kubernetes and OpenShift platforms. This role supports operational strategy, incident readiness, stability engineering, automation initiatives, and day to day operations oversight. You will drive operational excellence, ensure compliance, reduce toil, and provide leadership across teams that support mission critical platforms.
Contract Duration: 12 Months
Required Skills & Experience

• 6+ year's experience in Systems Operations, Cloud Operations, SRE, or related operational roles
• 4+ years in Kubernetes/OpenShift platform operations
• 2+ years Linux systems operations experience
• Experience in operational teams or platform operations functions
• Strong record of operational automation and incident management

Desired Skills

• Expertise in OpenShift platform management, ACM, Git/GitOps
• Strong experience with monitoring, logging, and observability tools (Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus)
• Proven ability to drive operational strategy, continuous improvement, and large-scale stability initiatives
• Excellent analytical and cross-team communication skills

What You Will Be Doing

• Lead the operational health, lifecycle, and governance of Kubernetes/OpenShift platforms. Drive standards, procedures, and operational readiness across all environments.
• Incident Management: support major incidents, coordinate cross team response, ensure timely restoration, manage communication, and drive root-cause and permanent corrective action.
• Reliability & Stability Improvements: works to enhance resilience, reduce platform incidents, eliminate recurring issues, and increase automation maturity.
• Operational Automation & Toil Reduction: Direct automation strategy for run operations, leveraging Python, GitOps, AI-assisted tooling, or self service workflows to reduce manual effort.
• OpenShift Platform Readiness: Own OpenShift cluster lifecycle activities, including new cluster builds, configuration, onboarding, upgrades, and cluster decommissioning, ensuring consistency, reliability, and compliance across environments.
• Cross Team Operational Enablement: support engineering, security, and development teams to adopt consistent operational patterns, guardrails, and readiness practices.
• Compliance & Controls: Ensure adherence to regulatory, security, and audit requirements; maintain strong operational hygiene and documentation.
• Expected to lead escalations and support major incidents
• Participation in on-call support
• Hybrid work required from one of the posted locations