Expert RHEL 10 / Kubernetes Engineer Needed

We need a senior Linux/Kubernetes platform engineer to build and document a secure, production-ready on-premises Kubernetes environment on three Dell PowerEdge servers. The platform will host a migration of our observability software. We need an engineer with demonstrated experience designing, deploying, securing, and supporting bare-metal Kubernetes clusters running stateful production applications. Current environment Three Dell PowerEdge physical servers RHEL 10 required On-premises environment Kubernetes-based hosting for Parlon observability software Existing network/security team available for coordination on VLANs, firewall rules, DNS, certificates, and access requirements Scope of work Assess Dell server hardware, firmware, RAID/storage layout, NICs, and iDRAC configuration Design the target architecture for a three-server production Kubernetes deployment Install and harden RHEL 10 on all servers Configure OS baseline: subscriptions/repos, SELinux, firewall, time synchronization, storage, logging, patching, and secure administrative access Deploy and configure Kubernetes using a supportable approach; recommend kubeadm versus Red Hat OpenShift based on Parlon compatibility, licensing, operations, and supportability Configure container runtime, CNI, ingress/load balancing, DNS, TLS, RBAC, NetworkPolicies, and cluster security Design and implement persistent storage, backups, retention, capacity management, and restore testing for observability data Deploy/migrate Parlon in coordination with the software vendor or our internal team Validate application availability, data ingestion, dashboards/queries, alerting, performance, and failover/restart behavior Produce complete documentation and conduct a knowledge-transfer session Required experience 5+ years administering enterprise Linux, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux Hands-on RHEL 9/10 experience in production 3+ years building and operating production Kubernetes clusters Strong bare-metal/on-prem Kubernetes experience; cloud-only Kubernetes experience is not sufficient Kubernetes administration: kubeadm and/or Red Hat OpenShift, CRI-O/containerd, Helm, RBAC, upgrades, backup/restore, and troubleshooting CNI/networking expertise: Cilium or Calico preferred; NetworkPolicies, ingress, load balancing, DNS, MTU, routing, and firewall troubleshooting Dell PowerEdge experience: iDRAC, RAID/HBA, BIOS/firmware, hardware monitoring, NIC bonding, VLANs Stateful workload and persistent-storage experience: CSI, NFS/iSCSI/Ceph/Longhorn or equivalent Security experience: SELinux, firewalld/nftables, TLS, secrets, image security, least privilege, hardening, and patch management Automation using Ansible and Git; infrastructure documentation is mandatory Excellent written English and ability to provide clear runbooks/diagrams Strongly preferred RHCE, RHCA, Red Hat OpenShift certification, CKA, and/or CKS Experience deploying observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, ClickHouse, VictoriaMetrics, or similar Experience migrating a stateful application from an existing server/platform into Kubernetes Experience integrating Kubernetes with enterprise DNS, PKI, load balancers, SIEM, and monitoring systems Experience with Cilium/Hubble or advanced Kubernetes network observability Deliverables Architecture/design document, including cluster topology, network diagram, storage design, IP/port matrix, and capacity assumptions Secure RHEL 10 build on all three Dell servers Fully working Kubernetes platform with health checks and documented operational procedures Persistent storage, backup policy, and a successful restore test Parlon deployment/migration plan, validation plan, cutover plan, and rollback plan Infrastructure-as-code/configuration artifacts in Git, preferably Ansible plus Helm/Kustomize manifests Operations runbook: patching, upgrades, certificate renewal, node replacement, backup/restore, incident triage, and escalation paths Recorded or live knowledge-transfer session with our technical team