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 within open-source infrastructure systems.

• Implement, manage, and troubleshoot OpenStack environments effectively.

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

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

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

• Oversee the entire infrastructure, from physical systems and network fabric to OpenStack services and customer workloads.

• Utilize Infrastructure as Code, configuration management, and automation to ensure consistent, version-controlled operations.

• Record decisions on architecture, runbooks, change plans, incident investigations, and recovery procedures.

• Engage in technical reviews, providing or receiving in-depth feedback.

• Be part of the Rootly-managed on-call rotation, addressing occasional out-of-hours incidents, maintenance, or operational requests.

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

• Collaborate effectively within a distributed, predominantly asynchronous team.

⛳️ Requirements

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

• Experience with OpenStack implementation, operations, or troubleshooting.

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

• Strong Linux systems administration and troubleshooting capabilities.

• Practical experience with data-center-grade hardware, including 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; experience with OVN, OVS, BGP underlays, LACP, Juniper, IPv4, IPv6, and physical or virtual cloud networks is advantageous.

• Ability 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 approach to architecture, automation, access control, and operational workflows.

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

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

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

• Discipline in planning and executing upgrades, migrations, and high-impact infrastructure modifications.

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

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

• Proficiency in using AI-assisted tools productively while recognizing their limitations.

• Excellent technical documentation skills, encompassing 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.

• Ability to function effectively in a distributed, largely asynchronous team.

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

• Experience with a variety of tools, including 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 will align with skills and experience.

• High level of discretion and autonomy in the role.

• Work within a distributed, predominantly asynchronous team.

• Opportunities for autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

• Meaningful chance to contribute to world-class compute and storage hosting platforms.