OpenShift Architect in College Park, Maryland at Vantage Point Consulting, Inc.

About Vantage Point Consulting Inc.

Vantage Point Consulting is a mission-driven, woman- and veteran-owned small business. For almost two decades, we have operated at the intersection of higher education, workforce development, and public service, delivering innovative solutions that empower individuals, teams, and entire organizations. We believe in the power of growth, authentic relationships, and bringing heart and precision to every engagement. Just as we take care of our clients, we take care of our people. If you are looking for your next chapter, where your leadership skills and commitment to excellence will be recognized and put to meaningful use, you will find a home at Vantage Point.

OpenShift Architect

Location: Onsite, College Park, MD

Engagement Type: Independent contractor (1099 or C2C)

Statement of Work:

Vantage Point Consulting is seeking a highly experienced OpenShift Architect contractor to lead the design and implementation of a scalable container platform based on Red Hat OpenShift, ensuring high availability, security compliance, and alignment with enterprise DevOps practices. The Architect will define reference architectures, support workload migration, and establish operational best practices. The resource will also assist in building clusters to migrate virtual machines from VMware into OpenShift OVE, as well as build clusters for OKE for modernization of apps into containers.

Task Description:

The OpenShift Architect shall:

• Lead the design and architecture of scalable, secure, and highly available container platforms using Red Hat OpenShift
• Establish enterprise reference architectures, standards, and design patterns for containerized workloads
• Oversee deployment, upgrade, and lifecycle management strategies for OpenShift clusters, both OVE and OKE clusters
• Evaluate and recommend infrastructure designs for hybrid, multi-cloud, and on-prem environments
• Ensure container platform designs comply with Federal security requirements (e.g., NIST 800-53, FedRAMP, or agency-specific standards)
• Lead migration strategies for transitioning legacy applications to container-based architectures and migrating VMware VMs into OpenShift OVE
• Provide technical leadership to engineers, DevOps teams, and Government stakeholders
• Develop and review high-level and low-level architecture documentation, including diagrams, roadmaps, and implementation plans
• Serve as escalation point for complex platform issues and architectural decisions
• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers and provide knowledge transfer to Government staff

Required Skills/Level of Experience

OpenShift Skills

• Deep expertise with Red Hat OpenShift architecture and operations
• Multi-cluster design and management
• Cluster sizing, capacity planning, and performance tuning
• OpenShift upgrades, lifecycle management, and platform governance
• OpenShift virtualization and container-native storage concepts
• Platform observability, monitoring, logging, and alerting

Kubernetes Expertise

• Advanced understanding of Kubernetes internals
• Networking, ingress, service meshes, and DNS
• Security contexts, RBAC, admission controllers, and policies
• Stateful and stateless workloads
• Operators and Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs)
• High availability and disaster recovery architectures

Cloud & Infrastructure

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Microsoft Azure
• Google Cloud
• VMware and on-premises environments
• Hybrid and multi-cloud architectures

Key Infrastructure Knowledge

• Compute, storage, and networking
• Load balancers and firewalls
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
• Identity and access management

Security Skills

• Zero-trust architecture principles
• Container security and image scanning
• Secrets management
• Compliance frameworks (NIST, FedRAMP, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, etc.)
• Network segmentation and policy design
• Identity integration (LDAP, Active Directory, SSO)

Engagement Type & Rate

This role is offered as an independent contractor engagement, structured as either 1099 or corp-to-corp (C2C) at the contractor's election.

Salary range: $105 to $135/hr, commensurate with experience and engagement structure.

This is an onsite position based in College Park, MD.

Work Authorization

Due to federal contract requirements governing this engagement, the contractor must be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident alien. H-1B visa holders cannot be accommodated for this role.