Distributed Systems Architect: Bare-Metal and High-Scale

Cercli Tech Limited; Abu Dhabi; On-site; AED 350,000 - 650,000; Full time

Job summary

Analog builds industrial intelligence infrastructure and seeks a Distributed Systems Architect for bare-metal, high-scale deployments in Abu Dhabi, UAE. You will own architectural blueprints across Kafka/Redpanda, PostgreSQL (Patroni), and software-defined storage, ensuring air-gapped environments meet resilience requirements.

You will design multi-node clusters, tune Linux kernels and NUMA bindings, and deliver implementation-ready blueprints and runbooks for DevOps automation, guiding on-site

Qualifications

• 10+ years architecting distributed infrastructure in production.
• Expert-level Kafka or Redpanda clustering and operational lifecycle.
• Deep Linux systems engineering and NUMA awareness.
• Experience deploying HA databases without cloud load balancers (Patroni, Pacemaker).
• Experience with software-defined storage (Ceph, MinIO) on physical hardware.
• Ability to produce implementation-ready blueprints and runbooks for DevOps automation.

Responsibilities

• Map on-premises open-source infrastructure to equivalents: Event Hub to Kafka/Redpanda, IoT Hub to EMQX, ADX to ClickHouse/Druid, Blob Storage to Ceph/MinIO.
• Design multi-node clusters and topology for bare-metal deployments.
• Tune kernel networking, NUMA bindings, and I/O schedulers for petabyte-scale workloads.
• Create reproducible benchmark harnesses and runbooks for deployment.
• Review client hardware specs and ensure air-gap security compliance before deployment.

Skills

Distributed systems design

DevOps collaboration

Technical leadership

Performance tuning

Tools

Kafka

Redpanda

PostgreSQL (Patroni)

Ceph

MinIO

Terraform

Ansible

RocksDB

Flink

Job description

Distributed Systems Architect: Bare-Metal and High-Scale

Full time

On-site

Abu Dhabi - United Arab Emirates

Distributed Systems Architect: Bare-Metal and High-Scale

You will own the architectural blueprints for Analog's on-premises open-source infrastructure, designing the clustering, replication, and failover topologies across messaging, streaming, and database layers that our DevOps team then automates at scale across client deployments. This is a hands-on, implementation-grade architecture role where the quality of your output directly determines whether a physically isolated or air-gapped client environment survives hardware failure at petabyte scale.

What You’ll Do

Open-Source Infrastructure Mapping

• Map Analog's Azure PaaS components to open-source equivalents: Event Hub to Kafka/Redpanda, IoT Hub to EMQX, ADX to ClickHouse or Apache Druid, and Blob Storage to Ceph/MinIO
• Produce side-by-side equivalence assessments documenting feature gaps, operational differences, and migration risk for each component transition
• Validate client hardware specifications and assess compliance with air-gap security requirements prior to each deployment

Cluster and Topology Design

• Design multi-node clustering, rack-aware replication, and quorum topologies for bare-metal Kafka/Redpanda and PostgreSQL (Patroni) clusters
• Design resilience protocols for hardware and network switch failures in physically isolated or air-gapped client environments
• Architect RocksDB state backend tuning for stateful Apache Flink workloads, including compaction strategy, block cache sizing, and write-ahead log configuration

Linux and Hardware Optimization

• Tune Linux kernel parameters, NUMA bindings, network ring buffers, and NVMe I/O scheduler configurations to eliminate hardware bottlenecks under petabyte-scale write workloads
• Define CPU affinity, IRQ balancing, and huge page configurations for latency-sensitive broker and database processes
• Author reproducible benchmark harnesses to validate configuration changes against client hardware before production rollout

Blueprints and DevOps Enablement

• Deliver precise, implementation-ready configuration blueprints and runbooks for Terraform and Ansible automation, documents the DevOps team can execute without architectural interpretation
• Maintain a library of parameterized reference architectures covering single-rack, multi-rack, and geographically distributed bare-metal topologies
• Conduct pre-deployment reviews of client hardware specs and provide go/no-go assessments with remediation guidance

What You’ll Bring

• 10+ years architecting and operating distributed infrastructure at TB to PB scale in production environments
• Expert-level Kafka or Redpanda clustering: partitioning strategy, ISR tuning, consumer group management, compaction policies, and operational lifecycle at scale
• Deep Linux systems engineering: kernel networking subsystems (TCP buffer tuning, interrupt coalescing), storage fabrics, and NUMA-aware process binding
• Proven track record deploying HA database clusters without cloud load balancers: Patroni, Pacemaker, or equivalent in production
• Experience deploying software-defined storage (Ceph, MinIO) on physical hardware in production, including CRUSH maps, erasure coding, and performance tuning
• Ability to produce implementation-ready blueprints and runbooks; your output must be directly actionable by a DevOps automation team without architectural interpretation

About Analog

Analog builds industrial intelligence infrastructure for the physical world. We deliver high-throughput data pipelines, real-time analytics, and edge-to-cloud connectivity for mission-critical environments where cloud dependency is not an option. Our clients operate in regulated, air-gapped, and physically demanding settings and they depend on us to get the infrastructure right from day one.

This is a full-time, on-site role.

Job details

Job type

Full time

On-site

Location

Abu Dhabi - United Arab Emirates