OpenShift Senior Operator (Kubernetes / OpenShift)

Senior OpenShift Platform Operations Lead (Kubernetes/OpenShift) 

Salary: £72,702 - £80,780 

Location(s): Manchester, Leeds or Edinburgh 

Hours: Full-time, 35 hours per week 

Working Pattern: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week, or 40% of our time, at one of our Manchester, Leeds, or Edinburgh office sites. Colleagues with disabilities can be supported with workplace adjustments including hybrid working expectations in line with our Flexibility Works policy. 

About this opportunity 

Are you passionate about running large-scale container platforms that power critical services used by millions of customers? 

We're looking for a Senior OpenShift Platform Operations Lead to take ownership of the operational performance, resilience and security of our OpenShift estate. This is a senior leadership role where you'll shape operational strategy, set standards and drive best practice across multiple platform environments. 

Working closely with Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Security and Service Management teams, you'll help ensure our OpenShift platforms remain stable, secure and ready to support business-critical customer services. You'll influence technical direction, improve operational maturity and lead responses to complex incidents, helping us deliver reliable services at scale. 

What you'll be doing 

• Leading operational outcomes across our OpenShift platform estate, ensuring services remain secure, resilient, compliant and fully supported. 

• Defining and embedding operational standards, runbooks and governance across incident management, change execution, access controls and platform lifecycle activities. 

• Providing leadership during major incidents, coordinating technical teams and driving effective root cause analysis and long-term improvements. 

• Overseeing platform upgrades, patching and lifecycle management, ensuring changes are delivered safely and in line with risk and security requirements. 

• Driving improvements in monitoring, observability and operational telemetry to enable proactive platform management. 

• Partnering with Platform Engineering teams to ensure new capabilities are operationally ready and supported by appropriate controls and documentation. 

• Coaching and mentoring colleagues, helping to raise operational standards and develop platform operations capability across the team. 

• Participating in a structured on-call rota, providing support outside normal working hours as part of a shared 24/7 service model. 

Why join us? 

We're investing heavily in technology, data and engineering capabilities as we continue our transformation journey. This is your opportunity to work with modern cloud-native technologies at enterprise scale, helping shape the future of platform operations within one of the UK's largest financial services organisations. 

You'll be part of a collaborative environment where you'll influence platform strategy, solve complex challenges and help deliver reliable services for millions of customers. 

What we're looking for 

• Extensive experience operating large-scale OpenShift or Kubernetes platforms in production environments, including multi-cluster estates. 

• Demonstrable experience leading platform operations, incident management and service recovery activities across complex technology environments. 

• Solid understanding of operational security controls, including RBAC, certificates, secrets management, authentication and audit requirements. 

• Experience managing platform upgrades, change governance and lifecycle activities within regulated or controlled environments. 

• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence and align Engineering, SRE, Operations and Security teams. 

And any experience of these would be great 

• Experience supporting OpenShift platforms across private cloud or hybrid cloud environments. 

• Knowledge of SRE, reliability engineering and modern observability practices, including monitoring and alerting optimisation. 

• Experience working with vendor support teams, including managing escalations and technical support relationships with providers such as Red Hat. 

This is a place for you… 

Our ambition is to be the leading UK business for diversity, equity and inclusion, supporting our customers, colleagues and communities. We're committed to creating an environment in which everyone can thrive, learn and develop. 

We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and launch a dedicated Working with Cancer initiative. 

We offer reasonable workplace adjustments for colleagues with disabilities, including flexibility in office attendance, location and working patterns. As a Disability Confident Leader, we guarantee interviews for a fair and proportionate number of applicants who meet the minimum criteria for the role and have a disability, long-term health or neurodivergent condition, through the Disability Confident Scheme. 

We provide reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process to reduce or remove barriers - just let us know what you need. 

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes 

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15% 

• An annual performance-related bonus 

• Share schemes including free shares 

• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, including discounted shopping 

• 30 days' holiday plus bank holidays 

• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies 

Ready for a career where you'll learn and thrive?