Openstack Infrastructure Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Develop, oversee, and enhance OpenStack compute and storage infrastructure.

• Manage and resolve issues related to open-source infrastructure systems.

• Design, automate, document, upgrade, and transition high-impact infrastructure platforms.

• Diagnose issues across compute, storage, networking, databases, message queues, containers, hypervisors, and guest workloads.

• Handle capacity, reliability, performance, recovery, and data-loss risks throughout the infrastructure.

• Take full responsibility for infrastructure from physical systems and network fabric up to OpenStack services and customer workloads.

• Engage in technical reviews, peer evaluations, testing, incident response, on-call operations, maintenance, and recovery tasks.

• Collaborate efficiently within a distributed and primarily asynchronous team.

• Utilize infrastructure tools and AI-assisted technologies to investigate, troubleshoot, document, automate, and resolve intricate IT infrastructure challenges.

⛳️ Requirements

• Proven experience in operating open-source infrastructure systems, with substantial expertise expected at a senior level.

• Background in OpenStack implementation, operations, or troubleshooting.

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

• Proficient in Linux systems administration and troubleshooting.

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

• Insight into how hardware design, power, cooling, rack configuration, and component failures impact platform reliability and performance.

• Strong grasp of networking fundamentals; experience with OVN, OVS, BGP underlays, LACP, Juniper, IPv4, IPv6, and both physical and virtual cloud networks is beneficial.

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

• Experience with large-scale virtualization and cloud infrastructure.

• Security-focused mindset towards architecture, automation, access control, and operational processes.

• SRE-oriented approach aimed at minimizing failure probability, recovery time, operational risk, and data-loss exposure.

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

• Preference for systematic, version-controlled automation over undocumented manual processes.

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

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

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

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

• Excellent 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 constructively to detailed feedback.

• Effective collaboration in a distributed, predominantly asynchronous team.

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

• Experience with a range of tools such as Ubuntu Linux, Ansible, OpenStack, Ceph, Terraform, Rundeck, LXC, Nspawn, OVN, OVS, BGP, JunOS, LACP, Docker, Prometheus, Grafana, Git, Jira, or similar technologies.

🏝️ Benefits

• Salary is negotiable, based on skills and experience.

• High degree of discretion and autonomy.

• Opportunity to engage in meaningful infrastructure projects.

• Work within a distributed, largely asynchronous team environment.