Senior Bare-Metal Distributed Systems Architect, High Scale

Cercli Tech Limited; Abu Dhabi; On-site; AED 450,000 - 650,000; Full time

Job summary

Cercli Tech Limited is seeking a Distributed Systems Architect to own the architectural blueprints for on-premises infrastructure, including multi-node clustering, replication, and failover across Kafka/Redpanda, PostgreSQL (Patroni), and storage layers. This is a hands-on role with architecture-quality output driving hardware-failure resilience in air-gapped client environments.

You will map Azure PaaS components to open-source equivalents, assess feature gaps, validate hardware specs, and

Qualifications

• 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, 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.

Responsibilities

• Map open-source equivalents for Azure PaaS components to on-premise infrastructure.
• Produce side-by-side equivalence assessments documenting feature gaps and migration risks.
• Validate client hardware specs and air-gap security compliance before deployments.
• Design multi-node clustering, rack-aware replication, and quorum topologies for bare-metal clusters.
• Architect resilience protocols for hardware and switch failures in air-gapped environments.
• Tune Linux kernel parameters and NVMe I/O schedulers to remove bottlenecks for petabyte-scale workloads.
• Deliver implementation-ready blueprints and runbooks for Terraform and Ansible automation.
• Maintain reference architectures for single-rack, multi-rack, and geographically distributed topologies.
• Perform pre-deployment reviews of hardware specs and provide go/no-go remediation guidance.

Skills

Distributed systems architecture

Kafka/Redpanda clustering

Linux systems engineering

HA database clusters

Software-defined storage

DevOps blueprinting & runbooks

Tools

Kafka

Redpanda

Patroni

Pacemaker

Ceph

MinIO

Job description

Cercli Tech Limited is seeking a Distributed Systems Architect to own the architectural blueprints for on-premises infrastructure, including multi-node clustering, replication, and failover across Kafka/Redpanda, PostgreSQL (Patroni), and storage layers. This is a hands-on role with architecture-quality output driving hardware-failure resilience in air-gapped client environments.

You will map Azure PaaS components to open-source equivalents, assess feature gaps, validate hardware specs, and