Senior Storage Engineer – OpenStack, Block, Object - (Remote USA)
United States - Remote•United StatesNorth America•June 9, 2023
The Cloud Architect is a key element within the Rackspace support infrastructure and is expected to provide department, company and industry management and implementation into solutions. The Architect is expected to take the initiative and advise on potential pitfalls that may encounter on large scale multi-platform infrastructure across all customers. Addresses specific customer needs through leveraging new and existing feature sets, products, and technologies. Evaluates documents solutions and trains Cloud Engineering and support staff to ensure supportability of customer environments. Serves as the last stop in the Rackspace support group for technical escalation and issue resolution of the most complex problems. Architects' own escalations to ensure resolution and are leveraged as a Subject Matter Expert for input on new product selection and implementation into the support structure. The Architect will also partner with vendors to analyze escalated requests for assistance, using this data to identify training opportunities that elevate the level of technical expertise and drive positive customer outcomes. Responsible for adhering to company security policies and procedures and any other relevant policies and standards as directed.
Career Level Summary
- Recognized as an expert within the company and requires in-depth and/or breadth of expertise in own job discipline and broad knowledge of other job disciplines within the organization function
- Solves unique problems that have a broad impact on the business
- Contributes to the development of organizational sub-function strategy
- Progression to this level is typically restricted on the basis of business requirements
Critical Competencies
- Systems Thinking: Provides deep expertise and a broad view of the organization to optimize linkages between structure, people, process, and technology
- Technology Advising/Consulting: Anticipates customers’ technology needs and asks the appropriate questions to clarify those needs; actively listens to detect customer specific nuances
Key Responsibilities
- Technical point of escalation to the Cloud Support and Engineering teams; resolving customer issues, working in collaboration with partners across the business, as required
- Create and deliver customer solutions that maintain, deploy, upgrade, and troubleshoot infrastructure solutions
- Participate in and define future state end-to-end architectures, platforms, products, tools, and solutions to advance security capabilities
- Work closely with customers in the pre-implementation process to design and architect desired customer solutions which require products which may not currently be in the supported product portfolio
- Research, plan and coordinate complex maintenance activities
- Lead analysis effort to support and drive Root Cause Analysis (RCA) exercises to drive process & technology improvements related to systems support products.
- Review vendor support escalations to identify training opportunities
- Collaborate and share knowledge with other administrators and engineers via wiki articles and training presentations
- Contribute to the development of technical best practices for administrative responsibilities
- Prepare and review defined policy and process standards
- Own assigned account specific complex projects and act as an informal project lead to work with stakeholders
- Actively engage partners and vendors to understand vendor products, proof of concept implementations, and guide successful onboarding and integration of new Cloud technologies
- Coach, mentor and assists Rackers across the business
- Collaborate with Account Managers and Business Development Consultants to build strong customer relationships
- Collaborate and share knowledge with the OS support floor
Person Specification Requirements:
- Expert knowledge of Cloud Platform Products such as OpenStack, Red Hat OSP or Kubernetes especially with storage related projects such as Cinder, CSI
- Expert skills in at least one of the following languages: Python, Go
- Expert skills in leveraging CI/CD and git tools to automate testing and deployment
- Expert knowledge of Linux and optional Windows OS, including but not limited to: Server Failover Clustering
- Expert knowledge of storage protocols including iSCSI, NFS, Ceph Rados and RBD
- Expert knowledge of designing, building, implementing, analyzing, and troubleshooting distributed, highly available systems
- Expert automation skills with at least one configuration management system such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, or other such tools
- Knowledge of Project Management methodologies
- Expert understanding of services and protocols, configuration, management, and troubleshooting of hosting environments, including virtual machines and containers
- Expert knowledge in the application of current and emerging network software and hardware technology and protocols
- Regarded as the technical expert in their job discipline within the organization
- Requires in-depth and/or breadth of expertise in own job discipline and broad knowledge of other job disciplines within the organization function
- Anticipates business and regulatory issues; recommends product, process, or service improvements
Skills
- Passionate about technology and has a desire to constantly expand technical knowledge
- Detail-oriented in documenting information and able to own customer issues through resolution
- Able to handle multiple tasks and prioritize work under pressure
- Demonstrate sound problem-solving skills coupled with a desire to take on responsibility
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, both highly technical and non-technical
- Ability to communicate technical issues to nontechnical and technical audiences
- English language fluency preferred
Education Requirements
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Management Information Systems, or a related technical field
- At the Manager's discretion, 4 years of additional related experience may substitute for the degree requirement; if substitution allowed, regional equivalent to High School Diploma is required
Experience:
- 12 - 14 years of years of technical engineering and administration experience.
- Minimum 7-9 years hands-on experience supporting Linux systems including 2 or more of:
- Virtualization- primarily using KVM or OpenStack.
- Automation - Ansible, Puppet, SaltStack or other IT automation tools for medium and large environments with practical experience of Ansible Playbook creation
- Containers - especially with Docker, LXD/LXC, or Kubernetes.
- Ceph Storage technologies - block, object, and network.
- Networking (bonding, firewalling, bridging, switching, network file system tuning, MTU issues, etc.)
- Linux integration with other environments (authentication/directory services, network file systems, etc.)
- Cloud computing (provisioning, monitoring, orchestration, etc.)
- Troubleshooting experience:
- Basic reading of stack traces to be able to search for duplicates, escalate to the correct team.
- Understand OS and Application-level bugs and advise on next steps
- Programming fundamentals in any language.
- Customer support experience:
- Customer support is a priority
- Excellent communication skills
Physical Demands
- Occasional domestic travel, less than 10%
- General office environment: no special physical demands required
- May require extended periods sitting and viewing a computer monitor
- Schedule flexibility to include working weekends and/or evenings and holidays as required by the business for 24/7 operations