OpenBao Consultant

Reports To: Delivery Manager
Employment Status: Full Time
Salary: Up to £110,000 + Benefits

ControlPlane is a London-headquartered consultancy specialising in cloud-native, Kubernetes, and open-source security solutions. Our expertise lies in helping organisations adopt and secure complex cloud infrastructures by implementing security measures that are "secure-by-design" and "secure-by-default." This engineering excellence drives ControlPlane deep into cybersecurity, providing services like zero-trust architectures, threat modeling, supply chain security, and platform engineering.

We are acclaimed for our work in highly regulated industries, such as finance, healthcare, and national infrastructure. We help clients consume next-generation and open-source projects safely and securely. In addition to consulting, we are active contributors to the open-source community supporting projects like Flux CD, OpenBao, and FINOS AI Readiness.

We are seeking an OpenBao Consultant with a strong hybrid background in technical consulting, secrets management, and pre-sales solution architecture. 

As part of a globally distributed team, you will be our technical expert based in European time zones (UK/EU). In this role, you will bridge technical expertise and commercial enablement. Joining sales calls, leading discovery sessions, designing tailored open-source secrets management architectures, and driving technical confidence to close deals. Beyond pre-sales, you will lead high-impact client engagements, perform hands-on OpenBao/Vault migrations and implementations, and contribute to internal labs and upstream open-source security projects.

Pre-Sales & Solution Architecture

• Technical Sales Enablement: Serve as the primary technical subject matter expert on sales calls and prospect meetings across UK and European business hours.
• Architecture & Scoping: Partner with account teams to discover client requirements, design scalable OpenBao/Vault solutions, draft technical proposals, and define statements of work (SOWs).
• Proof-of-Concept (PoC) Leadership: Lead technical demonstrations, PoCs, and architectural evaluations to showcase value and overcome technical objections to close deals.
• Global Collaboration: Work closely with our distributed global team to align pre-sales solution designs with delivery capabilities and ensure seamless project handovers.

Technical Delivery & Consulting

• Secrets Management Architecture: Architect, deploy, and harden enterprise-grade OpenBao instances running across cloud-native and on-premises environments.
• Migrations & Upgrades: Advise and execute seamless migration paths from proprietary or legacy secrets management systems to OpenBao.

Community & Thought Leadership

• Contribute to open-source tools, upstream OpenBao initiatives, and internal ControlPlane security research.
• Represent ControlPlane at technical conferences, webinars, and community meetups.

Core Secrets Management Expertise

• Deep, practical experience with either OpenBao or HashiCorp Vault (architectural design, high availability, dynamic secrets, PKI, auto-unseal mechanisms, namespace/policy design, and identity engines).
• Hands-on experience with secrets migration, lifecycle management, and disaster recovery strategies.

Pre-Sales & Client-Facing Skills

• Proven track record in a technical pre-sales, solution architecture, or customer-facing consulting role.
• Strong ability to translate complex security and compliance concepts into business value for C-level executives, security leadership, and platform engineers.
• Confident presentation skills with a demonstrated ability to guide clients through complex sales cycles and build technical trust.

Cloud-Native & DevSecOps Engineering

•  Experience with cloud-native architectures and container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, EKS, GKE, AKS, or OpenShift).
• Strong knowledge of Infrastructure as Code using Terraform or OpenTofu.
• Familiarity with CI/CD security automation and pipeline hardening.
• Working knowledge or desire to code/script in Golang, Python, or CLI tooling.

Location & Eligibility

• Must be located in the UK or Europe with existing right to work (remote or hybrid London).
• Ability to align work hours with European client time zones while collaborating with a global team.

ControlPlane is a dynamic, cutting-edge and passionate business to work for. Our employees are at the heart of our business, which means we care about our culture, our people and their progression.

Alongside this, as a colleague you will have the following benefits:

• Generous and competitive salary + Bonus
• 33 days of paid holiday, including paid leave for the standard 8 UK Bank Holidays
• Enhanced Parental Leave
• Private Medical and Dental Insurance
• An individual training budget for personal development, including but not limited to:
• Conferences
• Training (books, courses, coaching, as well as internal training which is of course included beyond budget)
• Qualifications

We believe our peers are equally as important as the technology we use. We’re looking for people of the highest personal calibre: quietly confident, with a strong work ethic, keenness to learn, emotional maturity and respect, who understand that “we” is more than “me” and who embrace human diversity of all kinds.

As we grow, you’ll help us build a company culture of which we can all be proud. If you share these values, we want to hear from you!

NOTE FOR RECRUITMENT AGENCIES: Please do not call or email our team speculatively. We do not accept unsolicited CVs