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.

• Maintain and troubleshoot open-source infrastructure systems.

• Architect and uphold dependable compute and storage hosting environments.

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

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

• Automate infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code, configuration management, and version-controlled tools.

• Oversee architecture, access control, operational workflows, capacity, performance, recovery, and data-loss risks.

• Create architecture decisions, runbooks, change plans, incident reports, and recovery protocols.

• Engage in technical reviews and foster innovation while solving complex IT infrastructure challenges.

• Participate in on-call support and address occasional out-of-hours incidents, maintenance, or operational requests.

⛳️ Requirements

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

• Background in OpenStack implementation, operations, or troubleshooting.

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

• Strong proficiency in Linux systems administration and troubleshooting.

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

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

• Robust networking fundamentals; experience in OVN, OVS, BGP underlays, LACP, Juniper, IPv4, IPv6, and physical or virtual cloud networks is advantageous.

• 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 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 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 throughout the entire stack from physical infrastructure and network fabric to OpenStack services and 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.

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

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

• Ability to work efficiently in a distributed, predominantly asynchronous team environment.

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

• Familiarity 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 aligned with skills and track record.

• High degree of discretion and autonomy guided by company principles and values.

• Work within a distributed, largely asynchronous team.

• Participate in an on-call rotation managed through Rootly.