Openstack Infrastructure Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Construct, oversee, and expand OpenStack compute and storage infrastructure.

• Manage and resolve issues within open-source infrastructure systems.

• Implement, manage, and troubleshoot OpenStack environments.

• Oversee distributed storage systems like Ceph, focusing on capacity, replication, failure domains, recovery, latency, and performance.

• Administer and resolve issues in Linux systems.

• Work with data-center-grade hardware and evaluate its impact on reliability and performance.

• Troubleshoot compute, storage, networking, databases, message queues, containers, hypervisors, and guest workloads.

• Manage virtualization and cloud infrastructure at a large scale.

• Design and maintain secure architecture, automation, access controls, and operational workflows.

• Utilize an SRE approach to minimize failure probability, recovery time, operational risk, and data loss exposure.

• Develop Infrastructure as Code, configuration management, and automation strategies.

• Plan and carry out upgrades, migrations, and significant infrastructure changes.

• Take ownership of infrastructure from physical components and network fabric through OpenStack services to customer workloads.

• Analyze infrastructure capacity and performance.

• Employ AI-assisted tools for research, troubleshooting, documentation, and automation while exercising engineering judgment, peer review, and testing.

• Create technical documentation, architecture decisions, runbooks, change plans, incident findings, and recovery procedures.

• Participate in technical reviews and respond constructively to detailed feedback.

• Join an on-call rotation through Rootly and address occasional out-of-hours incidents, maintenance, or operational requests.

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven experience operating open-source infrastructure systems; extensive experience is expected at the senior level.

• Experience in OpenStack implementation, operations, or troubleshooting.

• Familiarity with Ceph or similar distributed storage systems, covering capacity, replication, failure domains, recovery, latency, and performance.

• Strong skills in Linux systems administration and troubleshooting.

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

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

• Solid networking fundamentals; experience with OVN, OVS, BGP underlays, LACP, Juniper, IPv4, IPv6, and physical or virtual cloud networks is beneficial.

• Capability to troubleshoot across compute, storage, physical and virtual networking, databases, message queues, containers, hypervisors, and guest workloads.

• Experience managing virtualization and cloud infrastructure at scale.

• Security-focused approach to architecture, automation, access control, and operational workflows.

• SRE mindset aimed at reducing failure probability, recovery time, operational risk, and data loss exposure.

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

• Preference for repeatable, version-controlled automation instead of undocumented manual processes.

• Disciplined in planning and executing upgrades, migrations, and high-impact infrastructure changes.

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

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

• Proficient in using AI-assisted tools effectively while recognizing their limitations.

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

• Ability to contribute positively to technical reviews, challenge unsafe assumptions, and respond well to detailed feedback.

• Ability to collaborate effectively in a distributed, predominantly asynchronous team environment.

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

• Familiarity with several of the listed tools or similar: Ubuntu Linux, Ansible, OpenStack, Ceph, Terraform, Rundeck, LXC, Nspawn, OVN, OVS, BGP, JunOS, LACP, Docker, Prometheus, Grafana, Git, and Jira.

• Ability to utilize infrastructure tools to innovate, resolve complex IT infrastructure challenges, and function as a strong team player.

• Must be a resident of South Africa.

🏝️ Benefits

• Negotiable salary, aligned with skills and track record.

• High level of discretion and autonomy.

• Distributed, largely asynchronous team environment.