AWX/Ansible Automation Architect - 100% Remote

Role: AWX/Ansible Automation Architect

Locations: 100% Remote

Duration: 12+ Months Contract

Role Summary:

·                     The AWX / Ansible Automation Architect will be responsible for assessing, designing, and enhancing enterprise automation environments with a focus on high availability, resiliency, and operational continuity.

·                     This role requires deep expertise in AWX/Ansible, infrastructure automation, Red Hat Ansible Tower, and database management to ensure a robust, scalable, and fault‑tolerant automation platform.

Key Responsibilities:

AWX / Ansible Platform Management

·                     Administer, maintain, and optimize AWX environments, including upgrades, configuration, clustering, and troubleshooting.

·                     Design and implement high‑availability (HA) and redundancy strategies for AWX (replicas, node affinity, storage, operator‑based deployment).

·                     Analyze existing AWX deployments and recommend improvements to prevent outages, performance bottlenecks, or single points of failure.

·                     Define and enforce best practices for job templates, workflows, inventories, credentials, and RBAC within AWX.

·                     Manage integration of AWX with GitHub/GitLab/Azure DevOps, ServiceNow, HashiCorp Vault, or other enterprise tooling.

Red Hat Ansible Tower / Automation Controller Administration:

·                     Provide advanced administration and architectural support for Red Hat Ansible Tower / Automation Controller.

·                     Implement automation lifecycle governance (development → test → production).

·                     Manage execution environments, automation hub content, credential management, and secure integration patterns.

·                     Troubleshoot and optimize job execution performance, scheduling, and controller/worker scaling.

Database & SQL Management:

·                     Administer and support the PostgreSQL database backing AWX/Automation Controller.

·                     Implement backup and recovery strategies (pg_dump, PITR, snapshots, scheduled backups).

·                     Monitor query performance, tune parameters, and design HA architectures for Postgres (e.g., clustering, managed cloud services, Multi‑AZ).

·                     Ensure proper storage provisioning, replication strategies, and resiliency for AWX’s database layer.

·                     Support SQL‑based integrations (CMDBs, reporting systems, analytics platforms).

Automation & Infrastructure Engineering:

·                     Design and review Ansible playbooks, roles, modules, and automation frameworks following best practices.

·                     Provide stewardship over automation content versioning, GitOps workflows, and secure code review processes.

·                     Integrate automation with cloud and on‑prem platforms (AWS, Azure, VMware, Cisco, etc.).

·                     Implement monitoring, logging, observability dashboards, SLOs/SLIs, and proactive alerting.

Reliability, Security & Compliance:

·                     Assess the root causes of prior outages (e.g., patch‑related AWX failures) and develop mitigation strategies.

·                     Implement secrets management, RBAC, least‑privilege principles, and credential isolation for automation workloads.

·                     Ensure automation environments meet enterprise security, compliance, and audit requirements.

Required Skills & Experience:

·                     Hands‑on AWX administration, including Operator deployment, Kubernetes/OpenShift knowledge, and HA design.

·                     Strong PostgreSQL or SQL database administration experience (backup, recovery, replication, tuning).

·                     Red Hat Ansible Tower / Automation Controller administration experience (HA, RBAC, workflows, scaling).

·                     Expert‑level knowledge of Ansible playbooks, YAML, roles, inventories, templating, Ansible Vault.

·                     Kubernetes (k8s) skills for managing AWX clusters, including pods, deployments, ingress controllers, and stateful services.

·                     Strong Linux (RHEL/CentOS) systems understanding.

·                     Experience integrating automation with CI/CD pipelines.

·                     Familiarity with logging, monitoring, observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Splunk).

Soft Skills:

·                     Ability to assess client environments and produce clear architectural recommendations.

·                     Strong documentation skills (HLDs, LLDs, runbooks, operational models).

·                     Ability to communicate complex concepts to technical and non‑technical audiences.

·                     Proven record of stabilizing and maturing automation platforms in enterprise environments.

Preferred Certifications:

·                     Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)

·                     Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation

·                     Kubernetes certifications (CKA/CKAD)

PostgreSQL or cloud database certifications (AWS/Azure/Google Cloud Platform)