Principal Systems Engineer - Containers (Remote)

First Citizens Bank•Raleigh, NC

1d•Remote

About The Position

This is a remote role open for multiple markets across the United States. We are seeking a highly experienced Principal OpenShift Engineer to lead the architecture, administration, automation, security, and operational excellence of enterprise Red Hat OpenShift platforms. This role is responsible for designing and managing highly available, scalable, and secure Kubernetes/OpenShift environments supporting mission-critical applications across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures. The ideal candidate will serve as a technical leader, driving platform strategy, establishing best practices, leading engineering teams, and partnering with architects, security teams, developers, and business stakeholders to deliver a world-class container platform.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree and 10 years of experience in Technical Hands-On Leader of Cloud Teams OR High School Diploma or GED and 14 years of experience in Technical Hands-On Leader of Cloud Teams
10+ years of infrastructure engineering, systems administration, or platform engineering experience.
7+ years of Kubernetes/OpenShift administration experience.
Experience managing large-scale production OpenShift environments.
Proven experience supporting highly regulated, mission-critical applications.
Demonstrated experience leading enterprise platform initiatives.
OpenShift & Kubernetes: Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP), Kubernetes Administration, OpenShift Operators, OpenShift Service Mesh, OpenShift Pipelines, OpenShift GitOps, OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF)
Operating Systems: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Linux Administration, System Performance Tuning
Cloud Platforms: One of the public Cloud, Hybrid Cloud Architectures
Automation & DevOps: Terraform, Ansible, Helm, ArgoCD
Networking: DNS, Load Balancers, TCP/IP, Ingress/Egress, VPN, Service Mesh, Istio
Storage Technologies: Ceph, NFS, SAN/NAS, Persistent Volumes, CSI Drivers
Monitoring & Logging: Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace/App Dynamics, Splunk, Open Telemetry

Nice To Haves

Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration
Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA)
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)
AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Azure Administrator Associate
Azure Solutions Architect Expert

Responsibilities

Design, implement, upgrade, and maintain enterprise OpenShift clusters across on-premises and cloud environments.
Develop platform roadmaps and technical strategies aligned with business objectives.
Architect highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable OpenShift environments.
Manage OpenShift cluster lifecycle activities including installation, upgrades, patching, backups, and disaster recovery.
Define standards for cluster provisioning, capacity planning, and workload optimization.
Serve as the subject matter expert (SME) for Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift technologies.
Administer cluster components including: Control Plane, Worker Nodes, Operators, Ingress Controllers, Routes, Registries, Storage Classes, Service Mesh
Optimize cluster performance and resource utilization.
Troubleshoot complex container, networking, storage, and orchestration issues.
Build Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions using: Terraform, Ansible, Helm, ArgoCD, GitOps
Automate cluster deployments, configuration management, and operational tasks.
Develop reusable automation frameworks to improve platform reliability and consistency.
Implement container security best practices and governance controls.
Configure: RBAC, Security Context Constraints (SCC), Network Policies, Identity Management integrations.Secrets Management
Partner with cybersecurity teams to meet regulatory and compliance requirements.
Conduct vulnerability assessments and remediation activities.
Establish observability frameworks using: Dynatrace, Alert manager, Elasticsearch, Splunk
Develop SLIs, SLOs, and operational dashboards.
Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement initiatives.
Support site reliability engineering (SRE) best practices.
Collaborate with development teams to onboard applications into OpenShift.
Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines using: GitLab CI/CD, ArgoCD
Champion GitOps and cloud-native operational practices.
Improve deployment automation and developer self-service capabilities.
Provide technical leadership for platform engineering and OpenShift operations teams.
Establish enterprise standards, governance frameworks, and operating procedures.
Mentor engineers and administrators across Kubernetes and container technologies.
Lead technical reviews, architecture discussions, and platform modernization initiatives.
Influence enterprise cloud and container platform strategies.