OpenStack Infrastructure Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in South Africa.

📋 Description

• Assist in the development, management, and scaling of OpenStack compute and storage infrastructure.

• Collaborate remotely with team members situated in various time zones.

• Add value to the OpenStack team by utilizing a strong understanding of infrastructure systems and expertise in troubleshooting.

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven experience in operating open-source infrastructure systems.

• Significant experience is anticipated at the senior level.

• Hands-on experience with OpenStack implementation, operations, or troubleshooting.

• Familiarity with Ceph or comparable distributed storage systems, including aspects such as capacity, replication, failure domains, recovery, latency, and performance.

• Strong skills in Linux systems administration and troubleshooting.

• Practical knowledge of data-center-grade hardware, encompassing enterprise servers, CPUs, memory, storage media, NICs, firmware, and out-of-band management.

• Understanding of how hardware design, power, cooling, rack layout, and component failure impact platform reliability and performance.

• Solid networking fundamentals, with advantageous experience in OVN, OVS, BGP underlays, LACP, Juniper, IPv4, IPv6, and both physical and virtual cloud networks.

• Ability to troubleshoot across various domains including compute, storage, physical and virtual networking, databases, message queues, containers, hypervisors, and guest workloads.

• Experience with virtualization and cloud infrastructure at scale.

• A security-focused approach towards architecture, automation, access control, and operational workflows.

• An SRE mindset aimed at minimizing failure probability, recovery time, operational risks, and data-loss exposure.

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, configuration management, and automation methodologies.

• Preference for repeatable, version-controlled automation rather than undocumented manual processes.

• Discipline in planning and executing upgrades, migrations, and significant infrastructure changes.

• Strong end-to-end ownership, covering everything from physical infrastructure and network fabric to OpenStack services and customer workloads.

• Capability to evaluate capacity and performance across CPU, memory, storage, IOPS, latency, throughput, packet rates, and control-plane scale.

• Ability to effectively utilize AI-assisted tools while recognizing their limitations.

• Proficient technical documentation skills, including architecture decisions, runbooks, change plans, incident findings, and recovery procedures.

• Capacity to contribute constructively to technical reviews, challenge unsafe assumptions, and respond positively to detailed feedback.

• Competence in working effectively within a distributed, primarily asynchronous team.

• Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation managed through Rootly and to respond to occasional out-of-hours incidents, maintenance, or operational requests as needed.

• Recognizes the distinction between “done” and “97% done” and the potentially significant costs associated with the latter.

🏝️ Benefits

• Comprehensive health and wellness programs.

• Opportunities for professional growth and development.

• Flexible work arrangements to promote work-life balance.