Red Hat System Administrator - Fusemachines

About Fusemachines

Fusemachines is a leading AI strategy, talent, and education services provider. Founded by Sameer Maskey Ph.D., Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University, Fusemachines has a core mission of democratizing AI. With a presence in 4 countries (Nepal, the United States, Canada, and the Dominican Republic) and more than 450 full-time employees, Fusemachines brings global AI expertise to transform companies worldwide. Founded in 2013, Fusemachines is a global provider of enterprise AI products and services, on a mission to democratize AI. Leveraging proprietary AI Studio and AI Engines, the company helps drive the clients’ AI Enterprise Transformation, regardless of where they are in their Digital AI journeys. With offices in North America, Asia, and Latin America, Fusemachines provides a suite of enterprise AI offerings and specialty services that allow organizations of any size to implement and scale AI. Fusemachines serves companies in industries such as retail, manufacturing, and government.

Fusemachines continues to actively pursue the mission of democratizing AI for the masses by providing high-quality AI education in underserved communities and helping organizations achieve their full potential with AI.

This role is a remote contractual role. Our work time will be from 1-10 PM PKT.

Key Responsibilities

• Administer and maintain Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) across the cluster nodes.

• Apply OS and platform patches, security updates, and OpenShift version upgrades in a controlled, low-downtime manner.

• Manage node lifecycle operations (cordon/drain, reboot, replacement, scaling) within OpenShift.

• Maintain and troubleshoot underlying Dell server hardware (PowerEdge or similar), including firmware updates (iDRAC), RAID/storage controllers, and network interfaces.

• Coordinate with the colocation facility in Nebraska for remote hands support, power, cooling, and physical access needs.

• Monitor hardware health (disk, memory, power supplies) and manage vendor support cases/warranty claims with Dell and IBM.

• Manage OpenShift cluster components: control plane, etcd, networking (SDN/OVN), storage classes, and ingress/routing.

• Administer container registries, projects/namespaces, RBAC, and resource quotas.

• Monitor cluster health using OpenShift-native tooling (cluster monitoring stack, Prometheus/Grafana) and respond to alerts.

• Support the IBM Watson deployment (IBM Cloud Pak for Data / "Fusion" stack) running on top of OpenShift, including operator health, storage-backed services, and application pods.

• Work with IBM support and documentation to troubleshoot Watson/Fusion-specific issues, apply IBM-provided patches/fix packs, and manage license entitlements.

• Coordinate planned maintenance windows and upgrades for the Watson/Fusion layer with minimal service disruption.

• Manage persistent storage backing the cluster (e.g., ODF/Ceph, NFS, or SAN-attached storage, depending on the environment).

• Implement and test backup/disaster recovery procedures for cluster configuration, etcd, and application data.

• Maintain network configuration for the private data center environment, including VLANs, firewalls, and load balancers as applicable.

• Apply security hardening in line with Red Hat and IBM best practices; manage certificates, secrets, and access controls.

• Maintain audit logs and support compliance/security review processes as required by the organization.

• Set up and maintain monitoring/alerting for cluster and application health.

• Diagnose and resolve incidents, performing root cause analysis and driving remediation.

• Document cluster architecture, runbooks, and standard operating procedures (this is especially important given the current environment is not well-documented internally).

Required Skills & Experience

• 3+ years of hands-on experience administering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in production environments.

• Solid working experience with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform administration (cluster operations, oc/kubectl, operators, RBAC, networking).

• Experience with bare-metal server hardware administration (Dell PowerEdge preferred), including iDRAC, firmware, and RAID management.

• Familiarity with container and Kubernetes fundamentals (pods, deployments, persistent volumes, namespaces).

• Experience working in or supporting a private/on-premises data center or colocation environment (as opposed to purely public cloud).

• Understanding of enterprise storage concepts (SAN/NAS, Ceph/ODF, or similar) as used in OpenShift persistent storage.

• Comfort with Linux networking (firewalls, VLANs, DNS, load balancing/ingress).

• Strong troubleshooting and incident response skills, with the ability to work independently in an environment with limited existing documentation.

• Good written communication skills for documentation and vendor coordination (Dell, IBM, Red Hat support).

Preferred / Nice-to-Have

• Direct experience with IBM Cloud Pak for Data, IBM Watson, or IBM Fusion/Fusion HCI appliances.

• Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration (RHCSA/RHCE + OpenShift certs).

• Experience with Ansible for configuration management and automation.

• Familiarity with IBM Storage Fusion / IBM Spectrum or similar hyper-converged infrastructure.

• Experience managing vendor support relationships (Dell ProSupport, IBM Support, Red Hat subscriptions).

• Prior experience in a regulated or high-availability environment where uptime and data locality (private, non-cloud hosting) are critical.