Platform Operations Engineer

About the Role

We are looking for a hands-on Platform Operations Engineer (Ceph Storage Specialist) to operate and continuously improve Ceph-based storage services that support on-premises Kubernetes and OpenShift platforms for one of our clientele project that is going live soon. This role is operations-focused (production reliability and supportability), covering monitoring, maintenance, upgrades, capacity management, hardware lifecycle, performance troubleshooting, and failure recovery. You will work closely with platform, network, infrastructure, and application teams to keep storage services reliable, scalable, and well-governed.

Key Responsibilities

• Operate and maintain production Ceph and OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) environments supporting Kubernetes/OpenShift platforms.
• Monitor and manage storage health and performance across capacity, latency, throughput, placement groups (PGs), and device status.
• Perform routine operational tasks including rebalancing, backfill, scrubbing, recovery actions, and general cluster maintenance.
• Plan and execute Ceph/ODF upgrades, patching, expansions, and configuration changes with minimal service disruption.
• Manage OSD and node replacement, including coordinating server/disk/firmware maintenance with infrastructure teams.
• Diagnose and resolve production incidents involving degraded PGs, slow ops, quorum issues, device failures, and network-related storage problems.
• Support Kubernetes/OpenShift storage consumption patterns, including: (Ceph CSI, RBD (block storage) & CephFS (shared file storage))
• Persistent Volume lifecycle troubleshooting (provisioning, attachment, mounting, expansion, and performance)
• Maintain and improve operational readiness through dashboards, alerts, runbooks, capacity plans, and recovery procedures.
• Test and validate recovery from disk, node, service, and network failures, and continuously improve resilience.
• Participate in production incident response, post-incident review, and root-cause analysis (RCA) drive corrective and preventive actions.
• Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders (platform, network, infrastructure, application teams) to ensure storage services remain reliable and supportable for clientele platforms.

Required Skills and Experience

• Hands-on experience operating Ceph in production environments (day-2 operations, troubleshooting, maintenance).
• Experience operating OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) and supporting storage services for Kubernetes/OpenShift platforms.
• Strong experience with storage operations, including monitoring, capacity planning, upgrades, expansion, and component replacement.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot complex storage issues across software, Linux, networks, and physical hardware.
• Working knowledge of storage hardware and performance considerations, including HDD, SSD, NVMe, HBA, firmware, and storage-network behaviour.
• Experience supporting block and shared-file storage using Ceph CSI, RBD, and CephFS, including PV-related troubleshooting.
• Experience benchmarking storage workloads and analysing performance bottlenecks (latency/throughput, saturation points, noisy neighbour symptoms).
• Experience in incident handling and operational discipline, including on-call/incident response, triage, and RCA practices.
• Automation/scripting capability using Ansible, Python, shell, or equivalent tools to reduce manual operations and improve consistency.
• Strong documentation skills to maintain runbooks, recovery procedures, and operational standards.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with backup, snapshots, replication, and disaster recovery (DR) operations for Ceph/ODF-backed platforms.
• Experience building or improving observability for storage platforms (dashboards, alert tuning, actionable SLO/SLA signals).
• Familiarity with platform/SRE practices such as reliability engineering, change management, and continuous improvement in production environments.
• Exposure to Kubernetes/OpenShift platform operations beyond storage (helpful for cross-team troubleshooting and incident coordination).