What are the responsibilities and job description for the SRE/Platform Engineer (OpenShift/Kubernetes) 4660 position at Tier4 Group?
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) / Platform Engineer
Location: Reston, VA (Hybrid — 2 days onsite / 3 days remote)
Employment Type: Full-time
About the Organization
Join a mission-driven, national financial services organization at the heart of the U.S. housing finance ecosystem. This is a mid-sized, highly regulated enterprise operating at market scale—supporting platforms and analytics that enable trillions of dollars in annual economic activity. You’ll work in a modern tech environment with strong engineering partners, clear business impact, and a mandate for reliability, security, and continuous improvement.
The Role
Our client is hiring a hands-on SRE / Platform Engineer to operate, tune, and scale our OpenShift/Kubernetes platforms while bridging on-prem to Azure to power our analytics ecosystem. You’ll own reliability, automation, and observability across a hybrid estate—partnering closely with developers, data engineers, infrastructure operations, and security to deliver secure, performant platform services using modern DevSecOps practices.
Why This Role Stands Out
- Hybrid impact: Operate critical OpenShift clusters and manage Azure services used by data and analytics teams.
- Hybrid architecture: Help design and support the bridge from on-prem to cloud—migration, integration, and steady-state operations.
- Real-world scale: Reliability work that directly supports high-volume financial market operations and enterprise analytics.
- Automation-first: Lean into Terraform, Ansible, and GitOps to make reliability repeatable.
What You’ll Do the First 180 Days...
- Operate, tune, and optimize OpenShift/Kubernetes clusters (scheduling, ingress, upgrades, quotas, policies).
- Stand up and/or refine observability (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana)—dashboards, alerts, SLOs, runbooks.
- Map current hybrid topology and critical delivery pipelines; identify toil and prioritize automation (Terraform/Ansible).
- Begin supporting Azure environments (compute, networking, storage, data services) used by analytics teams.
- Drive GitOps-first workflows; harden CI/CD with ArgoCD/Jenkins/GitHub Actions and policy-as-code guardrails.
- Implement or enhance platform services (Vault, Kafka/AMQ, ingress, service mesh) for dev and data teams.
- Lead incident response and postmortems; institutionalize RCA, blameless learning, and continuous improvement.
- Advance the hybrid service model—migrations, integrations, reliability/latency tuning, cost and performance optimization.
Day-to-Day Responsibilities
- Operate and optimize OpenShift/Kubernetes clusters, ingress (e.g., Nginx), and container networking/service mesh.
- Manage Azure services (compute, VNet, storage, data services) supporting analytics workloads.
- Build and maintain automated infrastructure with Terraform, Ansible, and GitOps workflows.
- Implement and evolve observability (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana): metrics, traces, logs, alerting, SLOs, runbooks.
- Design, harden, and support delivery pipelines with ArgoCD/Jenkins/GitHub Actions.
- Provide platform tooling and enablement for application developers, data engineers, and operations teams.
- Ensure security and access management (HashiCorp Vault, secrets management, least privilege).
- Lead incident response, coordinate cross-functional resolution, and drive corrective actions and platform improvements.
- Script or develop tools in Bash, Python, or Go to eliminate toil and improve developer experience.
Tech You’ll Work With
- Kubernetes / OpenShift
- Azure (compute, networking, storage, and data services)
- Automation & IaC: Terraform, Ansible, GitOps
- Observability: Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana
- Networking & Ingress: Nginx, service meshes, container networking
- Messaging: Kafka, AMQ
- Secrets & Access: HashiCorp Vault
- CI/CD: ArgoCD, Jenkins, GitHub Actions
- Scripting/Coding: Bash, Python, Go
Must-Have Qualifications
- 2 years hands-on operating and managing Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters.
- Strong experience with Microsoft Azure (compute, networking, storage, and data services).
- Proven skills in automation and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Ansible, GitOps).
- Proficiency with observability tooling (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana).
- Scripting/coding ability in Bash, Python, or Go.
Preferred / Stand-Out Skills
- Experience bridging on-prem and cloud in a hybrid service model (migration, integration, optimization).
- Expertise with Kafka/AMQ, HashiCorp Vault, and ArgoCD/Jenkins/GitHub Actions.
- Background leading incident response and postmortems with strong RCA and continuous improvement practices.
Work Model & Team
- Hybrid: 2 days onsite in Reston, VA; 3 days remote.
- You’ll be part of the IT organization, collaborating daily with developers, data engineers, infrastructure operations, and security.
How to Succeed Here
- You’re a hands-on engineer who thrives in regulated, high-impact environments.
- You favor automation over repetition, and observability over guesswork.
- You collaborate openly, communicate clearly, and leave systems better than you found them.