Senior OpenShift engineer (14+yrs exp. Needed)

Position: Senior OpenShift engineer (14+yrs exp. Needed)

Location: Windsor, CT - Onsite

Type: long term contract

Rate: open

Position summary:

What are the top 3 skills required for this role?

1. Redis

2. Valkey

3. OpenShift

Job Description/ Responsibilities

Professional Experience

10+ years of professional experience in infrastructure, DevOps, or platform engineering roles, with at least:

o 5+ years of hands-on experience with OpenShift or Kubernetes.

o 5+ years of experience with Redis (including production deployments, performance tuning, and advanced setups like clustering and Sentinel).

o Proven expertise in deploying and managing stateful applications in cloud-native environments.

o Track record of managing high-throughput, low-latency databases in real-time distributed systems.

Production Scale Experience

Experience operating Redis or similar in-memory databases (e.g., Memcached, Hazelcast) and key-value stores at enterprise scale with:

o Millions of queries per second.

o Large datasets requiring optimized memory usage.

o Reliability demands of >99.99% uptime.

Core Technical Skills

A. Redis & Valkey (Highly Advanced Proficiency)

Expert-level knowledge of Redis:

o Master-slave replication.

o Redis Sentinel for high availability.

o Redis Cluster for horizontal sharding and distributed data management.

o Memory optimization techniques for efficient handling of large datasets.

o Ability to debug, scale, and fine-tune Redis (e.g., handling eviction policies, tuning buffer utilization, and optimizing AOF/RDB persistence mechanisms).

Advanced knowledge of Valkey (or similar key-value database architectures), with a focus on scalability across distributed systems.

B. Automation (Infrastructure-as-Code):

Infrastructure-as-code expertise with:

o Helm charts to deploy and manage Redis/Valkey.

o Developing and managing Operators with automation built in Ansible, Kustomize, or Terraform.

o OpenShift-native CI/CD pipelines (Tekton/Red Hat Pipelines) for automated deployments and scaling.

C. Monitoring & Observability:

End-to-end monitoring of Redis and Valkey deployments with:

o Prometheus (e.g., redis_exporter for Redis metrics).

o Grafana dashboards for cluster state, replication lag, memory usage, and query performance.

o Centralized logging with the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) and OpenShift native logging solutions.

Expertise in interpreting metrics and logs for incident response.

D. Networking and Security:

Advanced knowledge of securing Redis/Valkey in cloud environments:

o TLS certificates for encryption in transit.

o IP-based firewalls or OpenShift NetworkPolicy for endpoint restrictions.

o External Secrets or OpenShift secrets for managing authentication credentials.

Expertise in debugging ingress, load balancing, and network latency issues.

3. Soft Skills

As a highly senior engineer, the individual is expected to bring advanced leadership and team collaboration skills:

Technical Leadership:

o Mentor developers, DevOps engineers, and platform teams on Kubernetes/OpenShift setups and database best practices.

o Own technical decisions around critical Redis/Valkey architecture, ensuring scalability and uptime.

Collaboration and Communication:

o Strong ability to coordinate with product teams, infrastructure architects, and security teams.

o Prepare detailed technical design documents and present system architectures.

Ownership and Problem Solving:

o Take end-to-end accountability for Redis/Valkey in production environments.

o Anticipate issues and proactively build systems to mitigate risks.

Challenges They Should Be Capable of Handling

1. Migrating Redis or Valkey deployments to OpenShift.

2. Zero-downtime upgrades for Redis clusters.

3. Guaranteeing max performance at peak loads (e.g., 1M+, high-throughput workloads).

4. Developing automated scaling and healing mechanisms for Redis on OpenShift.

Years of Experience: 14.00 Years of Experience