Openstack Infrastructure Engineer

At xneelo it starts with purpose. Were business enablers offering a hosting service for our customers to create and transact online. We spend each day working hard to retain the trust of our customers. Inspired by our brand promise trusted in hosting we deliver a web hosting service that is reliable and consistent focusing on infrastructure stability good value and consistent service delivery.

Were looking for a talented Openstack Infrastructure Engineer to help us build manage and scale our Openstack compute and storage infrastructure. Experience in building Openstack infrastructure from the ground up will be a distinct advantage but is not an absolute requirement.

If you love all things Internet IPv4 & 6 hypervisors scaling compute and storage IaC and open source in general you could find a meaningful opportunity at xneelo. If you are after autonomy mastery and purpose come and chat with us. If you find a powerful sense of achievement in putting your skill and personal strengths into action to deliver customer value through world class compute and storage hosting platforms then we really want to chat to you.

Location: South Africa

The strengths and experience were looking for in potential teammates:

• Experience operating open-source infrastructure systems. Extensive experience will be expected at senior level.

• OpenStack implementation operations or troubleshooting experience.

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

• Strong Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.

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

• An understanding of how hardware design power cooling rack layout and component failure affect platform reliability and performance.

• Strong networking fundamentals with experience in OVN OVS BGP underlays LACP Juniper IPv4 IPv6 and physical or virtual cloud networks being advantageous.

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

• Experience with virtualisation and cloud infrastructure at scale.

• A security-minded approach to architecture automation access control and operational workflows.

• An SRE mindset focused on reducing failure probability recovery time operational risk and data-loss exposure.

• Experience with Infrastructure as Code configuration management and automation practices.

• A preference for repeatable version-controlled automation over undocumented manual work.

• Discipline when planning and executing upgrades migrations and high-impact infrastructure changes.

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

• The ability to reason about capacity and performance across CPU memory storage IOPS latency throughput packet rates and control-plane scale.

• The ability to use AI-assisted tools productively while understanding their limitations. AI may accelerate research troubleshooting documentation and automation but does not replace engineering judgement experience peer review or testing.

• Clear technical documentation skills including architecture decisions runbooks change plans incident findings and recovery procedures.

• The ability to contribute constructively to technical reviews challenge unsafe assumptions and respond well to detailed feedback.

• The ability to work effectively in a distributed largely asynchronous team.

• A willingness to participate in an on-call rotation managed through Rootly and respond to occasional out-of-hours incidents maintenance or operational requests when required.

• Gets the difference between done and 97% done and the potentially significant costs of the latter.

Our current tech stack and tooling includes Ubuntu Linux Ansible Openstack Ceph Terraform Rundeck LXC Nspawn OVN OVS BGP JunOS LACP Docker Prometheus Grafana Git Jira and more. Experience with a reasonable number of these or similar will be important. Even more important is your ability to use these and similar tools to innovate solve complex IT infrastructure problems and to do this as a strong team player.

We are looking for talented engineers for these roles and salary will be negotiable commensurate with your skills and track record.

At xneelo our sincere desire is that our team members are inspired by their success and able to operate with a high level of discretion and autonomy guided by our principles and values. We hope this appeals to you and look forward to hearing from you.