Open Source Ceph Storage Engineer (Intermediate / Mid-Level)

Location: Cape Town CBD, Western Cape
Job Type: Permanent | Full-Time
Industry: Information Technology (IT)
Work Model: Hybrid

Overview

A well-established Cape Town-based cloud storage provider is seeking an experienced Open Source Ceph Storage Engineer to join its growing team. This role is ideal for a mid-level storage professional with hands-on production experience running Ceph clusters and managing enterprise storage environments.

The successful candidate will be responsible for operating geo-diverse production Ceph clusters across three data centres, working closely with senior infrastructure specialists on cluster operations, performance optimization, capacity planning, and customer onboarding.

This role requires an engineer who can independently diagnose and resolve complex storage issues, respond to incidents, and support mission-critical customer data environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Replace failed OSDs, verify cluster rebalancing, and maintain cluster health.
• Monitor and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks using Grafana and other monitoring tools.
• Onboard new customers and configure storage access credentials.
• Respond to and resolve Ceph cluster health warnings and incidents.
• Plan and execute Ceph version upgrades with rollback procedures.
• Review CRUSH map changes and identify potential failure-domain risks.
• Perform root cause analysis and create post-incident reports.
• Support customer onboarding and provide technical guidance.
• Assist with storage capacity planning and infrastructure growth forecasting.
• Collaborate with internal teams to align customer workloads with storage tiers.

Minimum Requirements

• Matric certificate and relevant IT certifications.
• Excellent communication skills in English.
• Strong organizational and problem-solving abilities.
• Ability to work independently and under pressure.
• Experience supporting enterprise or mid-market customers.
• Familiarity with data centre environments such as Teraco or Liquid Telecom facilities.

Open Source Ceph Requirements

• Minimum 2 years of hands-on Ceph production experience.
• Experience with Ceph RADOS, RBD, RGW, and CephFS.
• Knowledge of Cephadm and/or Rook Kubernetes deployments.
• Experience with OSD replacement, disk recovery, and cluster rebalancing.
• CRUSH map configuration and rack-aware replication experience.
• Strong understanding of BlueStore architecture and storage optimization.
• Experience performing major-version Ceph upgrades without downtime.

Storage & Hardware Experience

• Knowledge of enterprise SSD and HDD technologies.
• Understanding of CMR versus SMR drive architectures.
• Experience with multi-node storage clusters, JBODs, and HBA configurations.
• Familiarity with storage networking (25GbE and 100GbE environments).
• Understanding of RAID concepts and distributed storage architecture.

Networking Skills

• Strong TCP/IP, VLAN, and LACP bonding knowledge.
• Experience with S3, NFS, SMB/CIFS, and iSCSI protocols.
• Understanding of VPN connectivity and private interconnect environments.
• Ability to troubleshoot network-related storage performance issues.

Linux & Systems Administration

• Strong Linux administration experience (RHEL, CentOS, Rocky Linux, or Ubuntu).
• Experience with kernel tuning for storage workloads.
• Knowledge of systemd, journalctl, and Linux troubleshooting tools.
• Bash scripting and operational automation experience.
• Familiarity with LVM and block-device management.

Monitoring & Operations

• Experience with Prometheus and Grafana monitoring platforms.
• Ability to respond to Ceph health alerts and incidents.
• Capacity planning and storage growth forecasting experience.
• Runbook creation and operational documentation skills.
• Previous on-call support and incident management experience.

Advantageous Experience

• Veeam, Acronis, or Commvault integration.
• Rclone data migration and synchronization.
• Kubernetes and Rook-Ceph deployments.
• Samba gateway configuration.
• Erasure coding design and implementation.
• Tape library integration and archival storage solutions.
• POPIA and data residency compliance exposure.
• Managed service provider (MSP) or cloud storage industry experience.
• Customer-facing technical support and onboarding.
• Storage product launches and service deployment projects.

Apply Now

Interested candidates are invited to submit their CV to:

Email: talent@ambitconnect.co.za

Please include “Open Source Ceph Storage Engineer Application” in the subject line of your email.

Applications will be reviewed as they are received.