Kestrel Eight is an Australian owned consultancy working in platform engineering, infrastructure modernisation and integration. We are a Red Hat Advanced Partner and an IBM Partner, and we deliver with senior Australian practitioners who are named and profiled before a client commits.
Our clients run distributed estates in retail, critical infrastructure, finance, health and government. Simplifying complexity, scaling with confidence.
The role
You will work inside client environments as the senior engineer on their Linux and container platform, usually embedded with a small internal team who know their business well and need depth they cannot hire fast enough.
The work is fleet work. Estates of hundreds to thousands of nodes spread across sites that range from large facilities with proper network capacity to small branches on constrained links in regional areas. The problem is rarely a single build. It is making every site consistent, current and patched without a truck roll and without breaking a site that nobody can attend in person.
What you will do
- Set the standard build and reference pattern for RHEL and OpenShift at the edge, including when to retire older architectures and how to move a team onto container native footprints such as RHEL CoreOS and single node OpenShift.
- Make edge environments consumable as code through Terraform, Ansible and GitOps, so a site build is repeatable rather than hand-assembled.
- Own the CI/CD pipelines behind image factory builds, automated testing and fleet wide patch orchestration across both the host OS and the container platform.
- Design update strategies that suit the network, including staged rollouts and incremental rather than full image updates where bandwidth or site conditions demand it.
- Work with client security teams to turn compliance requirements such as CIS benchmarks for Linux and Kubernetes into automated remediation rather than a spreadsheet of findings.
- Use client telemetry to find the parts of a fleet consuming the most operational effort, and remove that effort in code, applying site reliability engineering discipline (incident response, observability, error budgets) rather than ad hoc firefighting.
- Backup and disaster recovery posture for edge nodes and clusters, including Veeam, so a lost site is a restore rather than a rebuild.
What you will bring
- 5+ or more years in infrastructure or software engineering, with at least 2 to 3 years in a platform architecture or platform product role covering edge computing or container platforms.
- Deep working knowledge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Kubernetes, with scripting in Bash, Python or Go.
- Red Hat Ansible (AAP) - Useful
- Hands on experience with distributed edge deployments, edge and branch networking (constrained links, segmentation, remote site connectivity), container runtime management and hybrid control planes such as Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management.
- Demonstrated experience moving a team from console driven administration to code based deployment using Terraform, Ansible and GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD.
- Practical understanding of what distributed sites mean for platform design: constrained links, capacity planning at branch scale, and sites that cannot be rebuilt in person.
- DevSecOps practice, including container image scanning and policy as code inside the deployment pipeline.
- Backup and disaster recovery experience for distributed infrastructure, ideally with Veeam, and the judgement to know when a restore strategy matters more than another nine of uptime.
- Site reliability engineering practice: comfortable owning error budgets, on-call rotations and postmortems, not just building the platform and handing it over.
- The judgement to balance application teams who want speed against security and operations teams who want stability, and to justify a platform investment with data rather than preference.
Well Regarded
- A degree in computer science or equivalent.
- Certification such as RHCE, EX280, CKA or CKS.
- Veeam certification (VMCE) or equivalent backup/DR platform credential.
The role is remote and open to candidates anywhere in Australia, with light travel to client sites as engagements require. Senior delivery oversight sits behind every engagement, so you are supported rather than dropped into a client and left to it. You may also work across more than one client and more than one vendor stack over time, keeping the work varied and your skills current.
Pay: $850.00 – $1,300.00 per day
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Sydney NSW
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