Openstack Infrastructure Engineer

Xneelo; Durbanville; Hybrid; ZAR 900,000 - 1,200,000; Full time

Job summary

Xneelo in South Africa is seeking an Openstack Infrastructure Engineer to build, operate and scale our Openstack compute and storage platforms. You will own end-to-end infrastructure, troubleshoot at scale and collaborate across teams to deliver reliable hosting for customers.

Strong Linux sysadmin foundations, OpenStack experience, Ceph storage knowledge, and IaC tooling (Terraform, Ansible) are highly valued. We offer a collaborative environment and competitive salary.

Qualifications

• Experience operating open-source infrastructure systems at senior level.
• OpenStack implementation, operations or troubleshooting experience.
• Experience with Ceph or similar distributed storage systems.
• Strong Linux systems administration and troubleshooting skills.
• Knowledge of data-centre hardware, servers, storage and networking basics.
• Understanding of capacity, performance and reliability implications of hardware choices.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code and automation practices.
• Ability to work in a distributed, async team and on-call rotation.

Responsibilities

• Build, operate and scale OpenStack compute and storage infrastructure.
• Troubleshoot across compute, storage, networking, databases and workloads.
• Own end-to-end platform reliability from hardware to OpenStack services.
• Collaborate with teams to deliver customer value through hosting platforms.
• Apply IaC and automation to repeatable, version-controlled changes.

Skills

OpenStack

Linux administration

Networking fundamentals

SRE mindset

Automation mindset

End-to-end ownership

Tools

OpenStack

Ceph

Terraform

Ansible

Rundeck

OVN

OVS

JunOS

Docker

Prometheus

Grafana

Git

Jira

Job description

At xneelo, it starts with purpose. We’re 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.

We’re 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 we’re 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.