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Senior Automation Engineer

Not Disclosed

Job Description & Details

This is a heavy-duty, 32-week platform automation gig focused on anchoring Red Hat OpenShift as the enterprise hosting standard for a major regulated utility in Virginia. You'll be bridging the gap between on-prem VCF clusters, Azure Red Hat OpenShift (ARO), and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), ensuring everything from GitOps promotion to security compliance runs smoothly without manual intervention. If you enjoy building bulletproof infrastructure foundations for enterprise workloads and migrating bare-metal apps to virtual clusters, this is your playground.

What You'll Actually Be Doing

Your day-to-day will revolve around untangling and refactoring existing GitOps repos in Azure DevOps, implementing ArgoCD ApplicationSets, and building automated namespace onboarding pipelines. You'll spend plenty of time configuring Kyverno governance policies, handling CyberArk Conjur secrets integration, and authoring Ansible playbooks and Terraform modules for Day-2 operations. You'll operate inside a standard two-week Agile sprint cadence, meaning you will pull stories from the backlog, build working automation artifacts, validate them in the Advanced Technology Center (ATC), and demo functional code at every sprint close.

The Core Tech Stack

You need absolute fluency in OpenShift 4.x and Kubernetes across VMware, Azure, and AWS environments, backed by solid production-grade Ansible and Terraform experience. Mastery of ArgoCD (ApplicationSets, app-of-apps pattern, drift reconciliation) and Azure DevOps is non-negotiable since they form the heartbeat of the deployment pipelines. Experience with Kyverno for policy-as-code, CyberArk Conjur for secrets management, and enterprise monitoring stacks like Dynatrace and Splunk will make or break your ability to survive this heavily regulated, high-compliance landscape.

Interview Expectations

The engineering leads will likely probe deep into your GitOps architecture knowledge by asking how you would handle complex multi-cluster rollouts using ArgoCD ApplicationSets while maintaining strict environment promotion gates. They want to see if you design for failure, so be ready to explain how you isolate blast radiuses when a policy-as-code deployment via Kyverno accidentally breaks downstream namespace quotas. The hiring manager is hunting for senior pragmatism—someone who can balance velocity with strict compliance frameworks like NIST without whining about change management red tape.

Application Advice

To get past the ATS screening, make sure your resume explicitly calls out production-scale OpenShift or Kubernetes migrations alongside heavy GitOps workflows with ArgoCD. Don't just list tools like Terraform and Ansible; highlight specific scenarios where you built reusable modules or automated pipelines from scratch in regulated sectors. Emphasize your hands-on experience with secrets integration (CyberArk or HashiCorp Vault) and compliance tooling, as these are the exact pressure points the client needs fixed immediately.