Senior OpenStack Engineer

About the role

Ilkari, a Dublin-based private start-up focused on data sovereignty, is hiring a Senior OpenStack Engineer in Tocancipá, Colombia. The role is hands-on and covers a secure, resilient and scalable public cloud platform built on Canonical Charmed OpenStack with Juju. It sits in the OpenStack Delivery Squad and works with Architecture, Security, Network Engineering, Infrastructure, Service Delivery and Product. The work model is hybrid: 3 days in the office and 2 days remote, with on-call and incident involvement and an out-of-hours rota during critical releases.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build, configure and operate a production OpenStack platform using Juju charms, bundles, models, relations and configuration.
• Engineer compute capacity, scheduling, images, flavours, quotas and workload placement.
• Integrate and operate Cinder, Ceph and Swift-based storage services, covering capacity, performance, replication, failure recovery and data protection.
• Define connectivity requirements with Architecture and Network Engineering and integrate the platform with the network underlay and fabric.
• Implement and operate a federated IAM solution with role-based permissions, single sign-on and enterprise identity integration.
• Administer and troubleshoot Ubuntu/Linux hosts and OpenStack control-plane dependencies, including configuration, patching, upgrades, certificates and platform health.
• Create repeatable, testable, version-controlled workflows using scripting, configuration management, infrastructure as code, Git-based pipelines and OpenStack APIs.
• Automate functional, integration, API, performance, upgrade, failover and recovery testing.
• Set up monitoring, logging, dashboards, alerts and synthetic checks, and apply security and resilience controls such as hardening, high availability, backup and disaster recovery.
• Support incidents, problems, changes and critical releases, and support new service capabilities and customer onboarding.
• Maintain technical designs, service maps, runbooks and documentation, and mentor engineers.

Required profile

• Strong hands-on experience building and operating production OpenStack platforms across compute, identity, image and storage services.
• Experience diagnosing complex issues involving compute scheduling, virtual networking, block and object storage and their underlying infrastructure.
• Advanced experience administering Ubuntu/Linux environments and practical experience integrating and operating Ceph within OpenStack.
• Proven experience in incident, problem, change and release practices, including controlled upgrades, rollback and root-cause analysis.
• Experience contributing to technical designs, peer reviews and cross-functional delivery.
• Desirable: a degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or a related discipline; equivalent professional experience is also valued.

Required skills

• OpenStack, Juju, Ubuntu/Linux administration
• Ceph, Cinder, Swift or equivalent object storage
• Automation and scripting, preferably Python, with configuration management, infrastructure as code and Git pipelines
• OpenStack REST APIs, SDKs and automation pipelines
• Automated testing, observability, logging, monitoring and alerting

What we offer

• A friendly, inclusive, multicultural environment with over 20 nationalities.
• Private health insurance and gym reimbursement.
• An annual learning budget for courses, tools or certifications.
• A family coverage plan and a generous referral bonus programme.
• In-company English lessons, three paid volunteering days per year, and the option to enjoy part of your holiday before completing the first year.