Senior DevOps Engineer – Kubernetes & Rancher Platform Specialist

Brief DescriptionLocation: Kochi, Kerala (On-site only) Experience: 6+ Years  Joining: Immediate  About the Role 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 Preferred SkillsMust-Have Skills & Experience

6+ 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 / FluxThe Job Location will be in Kochi Relocation Mandatory.