OpenStack Infrastructure Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Develop, oversee, and expand the OpenStack compute and storage infrastructure.

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

• Create and uphold dependable compute and storage hosting platforms.

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

• Strategize and implement upgrades, migrations, and significant infrastructure modifications.

• Utilize infrastructure-as-code, configuration management, and automation methodologies.

• Record architecture decisions, runbooks, change plans, incident findings, and recovery processes.

• Engage in technical reviews and offer comprehensive feedback.

• Collaborate within a distributed, predominantly asynchronous team environment.

• Take part in the Rootly-managed on-call rotation and address occasional out-of-hours incidents, maintenance, or operational requests.

• Provide customer value through a stable, reliable, and scalable hosting infrastructure.

⛳️ Requirements

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

• Familiarity with OpenStack implementation, operations, or troubleshooting.

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

• Proficient Linux systems administration and troubleshooting capabilities.

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

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

• Solid networking knowledge; 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 with virtualization and cloud infrastructure at scale.

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

• 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 practices.

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

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

• Strong ownership of processes 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 utilizing AI-assisted tools effectively while being aware of their limitations.

• Strong technical documentation abilities, including recording architecture decisions, runbooks, change plans, incident findings, and recovery procedures.

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

• Ability to work efficiently within a distributed, largely asynchronous team.

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

• Experience with a variety 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 and reflects skills and experience.

• High degree of discretion and autonomy in the role.

• Meaningful opportunities centered on autonomy, mastery, and purpose.