Senior Cloud Engineer at thinkahead

AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together advances in cloud infrastructure, automation and analytics, and software delivery, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation.   At AHEAD, we prioritize creating a culture of belonging, where all perspectives and voices are represented, valued, respected, and heard. We create spaces to empower everyone to speak up, make change, and drive the culture at AHEAD.    We are an equal opportunity employer, and do not discriminate based on an individual's race, national origin, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, marital status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law, whether actual or perceived.    We embrace all candidates that will contribute to the diversification and enrichment of ideas and perspectives at AHEAD.  Duties & Responsibilities: • Lead the support and operation of cloud infrastructure, platform services, identity, networking, security controls, and operational tooling across customer environments. • Able to architect and lead deployment of moderately complex solutions related to cloud solutions. • Understands performance, scaling and functional characteristics of software technologies • Ability to understand open-source and cloud use-cases and recommend standard design patterns commonly used in such solutions (best practices). • Own complex incidents, escalations, and problem investigations; perform advanced troubleshooting, coordination, service restoration, and follow-through to durable resolution. • Plan and execute complex changes and recurring operational activities including provisioning, access changes, maintenance events, backup and recovery validation, patching coordination, and platform hygiene. • Serve as a senior escalation point within the on-call rotation for major incidents, high-impact issues, and customer-approved after-hours change activity. • Follow and reinforce established ITSM processes for incident, request, change, problem, escalation, documentation, and customer-facing status communication. • Develop and maintain runbooks, SOPs, standards, knowledge articles, and technical documentation that improve consistency and service quality. • Mentor other Cloud Engineers, review work for quality and completeness, and provide technical guidance on operational best practices. • Drive monitoring, alerting, logging, tagging, policy, compliance, and cost-visibility improvements that strengthen managed cloud operations. • Use scripting, automation, and AI, to reduce repetitive effort, improve consistency, and scale service delivery. • General familiarity with DevOps/SRE tooling is required but is not the primary emphasis of the role. • Participate in customer meetings, service reviews, and advisory discussions; translate technical issues, risk, and improvement opportunities into clear business-facing communication. • Operate and support Red Hat OpenShift (Kubernetes) clusters in production, including cluster health, upgrades, scaling, and lifecycle management. • Manage OpenShift access and security controls, including RBAC, SCCs, NetworkPolicies, secrets management, and certificate/ingress considerations. • Troubleshoot platform and workload issues across Kubernetes/OpenShift constructs (nodes, operators, routes/ingress, services, deployments, pods, persistent volumes) and coordinate remediation with application, network, and security teams. • Implement and validate platform backup, restore, and disaster recovery procedures (e.g., etcd, cluster resources, and persistent data) in accordance with customer requirements. • Support platform automation and standardization efforts using infrastructure as code and GitOps practices (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, Helm, Argo CD) to improve repeatability and reduce operational risk. • Define and improve observability for cloud and OpenShift platforms (metrics, logs, traces), tune alerting to reduce noise, and contribute to availability, performance, and capacity planning. • Other job duties as assigned. Education & Experience: • Minimum Required - 5+ years in customer-facing IT infrastructure, cloud operations, systems administration, or managed services support, including work in production environments. • Strong operational expertise in at least one major cloud platform, with the ability to lead complex support and administration activities in Azure, AWS, OCI, or GCP. • Minimum 3+ years of experience supporting a production OpenShift environment (on-premises, ROSA, ARO, etc.). • Experience leading complex incidents, escalations, change execution, and problem investigations in production environments. • Experience with Windows and/or Linux server operations, networking fundamentals, identity and access management, monitoring, governance, and operational documentation. • Preferred - Experience in a managed services, consulting, or multi-customer support environment, ideally supporting complex enterprise customers. • Strong working knowledge of PowerShell, Python, Bash, infrastructure as code, automation, CI/CD, or related platform tooling used to improve cloud operations. • Relevant advanced cloud, operations, or platform certifications are a plus. Knowledge, Skills & Abilities: • Advanced troubleshooting, operational execution, and issue ownership skills in live production environments. • Preferred certifications: Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration (or Red Hat Certified OpenShift Administrator), Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA), Kubernetes certifications (CKA/CKAD), along with AWS/Azure certifications. • Ability to independently own complex and high-risk operational work, drive resolution across multiple teams, and make sound escalation decisions. • Strong customer-facing verbal and written communication skills for technical, operational, and advisory conversations. • Experience and ability to “jump on a whiteboard” in front of a customer to develop a solution to a business / technology goal or challenge. • Participate in pre-sales activities including scoping, positioning, technology adoption and maturation. • Strong documentation discipline, attention to detail, well organized, and respect for change control, service quality, and operational process. • Strong working knowledge of identity and access management, RBAC, least privilege, networking fundamentals, security controls, governance, and monitoring concepts. • Working knowledge of incident, request, change, problem, major incident, and escalation management in a managed services environment. • Ability to mentor others, review technical work, promote standards, and contribute to continuous service improvement. • Familiarity with source control, pipelines, infrastructure as code, observability, and related DevOps/SRE concepts as supporting capabilities rather than the primary focus of the role. • Able to provide time estimates for work that needs to be accomplished based on the available information. • Self-starter in finding work during non-scheduled work hours. • Prioritizes and completes tasks independently on-time or ahead of schedule. • Consistently exhibits a positive attitude towards AHEAD and its customers. • Willing to go the extra mile when asked to do so (i.e., time outside of normal working hours to support a customer initiative, production roll-out, could also be > 40 hours for short intervals). • Ability to travel as required. • Highly respected by peers and sales team. • Culture • Support initiatives beyond area of responsibility • Encourage cross team interaction • Achieve success through others and not just self-actions The compensation range indicated in this posting reflects the On-Target Earnings (“OTE”) for this role, which includes a base salary and any applicable target bonus amount. This OTE range may vary based on the candidate’s relevant experience, qualifications, and geographic location.     Why AHEAD:   Through our daily work and internal groups like Moving Women AHEAD and RISE AHEAD, we value and benefit from diversity of people, ideas, experience, and everything in between.   We fuel growth by stacking our office with top-notch technologies in a multi-million-dollar lab, by encouraging cross department training and development, sponsoring certifications and credentials for continued learning.   USA Employment Benefits include:  - Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance  - 401(k)  - Paid company holidays  - Paid time off  - Paid parental and caregiver leave  - Plus more! See benefits [Upgrade to PRO to see link] for additional details.    Use of AI: We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, assessing responses, or to capture recordings and create transcriptions or summaries during interviews. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans.   If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please refer to the Candidate Privacy Notice or contact us at [Upgrade to PRO to see contact].    You may opt-out of the review or analysis of your application and resume by AI tools by using the General Application. Please include the role you wish to apply for in the Additional Information field. You may also choose to opt-out of recording and transcription at any time, including after joining an interview.  Candidates will not be penalized for choosing to opt-out.