Senior DevOps Engineer – Kubernetes & Rancher Platform Specialist

Job Summary:

Senior DevOps Engineer (Rancher RKE2 + Kubernetes Expert)

Location - Kochi, Kerala – 100% On-site

Immediate Joiners

We are urgently hiring a hands-on Senior DevOps Engineer with deep production expertise in RKE2/Rancher-based Kubernetes platforms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux administration, security hardening, and full-stack observability in a highly regulated (PCI-DSS, RBI) environment.

Key Responsibilities:

• Administer large-scale production RKE2 Kubernetes clusters using Rancher (multi-cluster & multi-tenant)
• Perform cluster/node upgrades, certificate rotation, ingress updates, etcd backup-restore, HA setup & DR drills
• Deep administration and troubleshooting of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8/9 nodes (host OS for all control-plane & worker nodes)
• Manage and tune the complete ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Filebeat/Winlogbeat, Kibana) for centralized logging
• Deploy, upgrade and maintain Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, Loki, Promtail
• Administer self-hosted GitLab, GitLab Runners, secure CI/CD pipelines and kubeconfig generation
• Install, upgrade and operate Keycloak clusters (OIDC, SSO + 2FA, LDAP/AD sync)
• Configure and optimize HAProxy (TLS, real-IP forwarding, security headers)
• Enforce CIS hardening on both Kubernetes and underlying RHEL hosts (non-root, seccomp, SELinux, auditd, firewall)
• Lead security remediation, VA/PT finding closure and compliance (PCI-DSS, SISA, RBI)
• Onboard & migrate applications (Java, .NET, Angular, Mendix) to Kubernetes
• Build heavy automation using Ansible, Bash and Python.

Must-Have Skills & Experience:

• 5+ years of production DevOps / Platform Engineering experience
• Expert-level RKE2 + Rancher administration (mandatory)
• Very strong Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8/9 administration and hardening (RHEL subscriptions, satellite, SELinux, firewalld, auditd, SSH hardening, etc.)
• Hands-on setup and operations of ELK/EFK stack at scale (cluster tuning, index management, retention policies, hot-warm-cold architecture, security roles)
• Deep Kubernetes internals – Calico/Cilium, Ingress-NGINX, certificates, etcd, networking, security contexts
• Production experience with Prometheus + Grafana + Loki stack
• Self-hosted GitLab administration and GitLab Runner fleet management
• Keycloak clustering and integration with GitLab, Rancher, Grafana, etc.
• Strong HAProxy configuration and troubleshooting
• CIS benchmarking & hardening for both Kubernetes and RHEL
• Ansible automation and scripting (Bash/Python)
• Proven track record of executing Kubernetes DR drills

Nice-to-Have Skills:

• Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) or RHCA, CKA/CKS, Rancher certification
• Longhorn, OpenEBS or other CSI drivers
• ArgoCD / Flux

Job Type: Full-time

Ability to commute/relocate:

• Kochi, Kerala: Reliably commute or planning to relocate before starting work (Required)