Ceph Storage Specialist

Ceph Storage Specialist (On-Premises OpenShift cluster)

We are looking for a hands-on Ceph Storage Specialist to design, deploy, manage, and optimize storage infrastructure for our on-premises OpenShift clusters. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in Ceph, OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF), and enterprise storage administration in production on-prem environments. You will ensure high availability, performance, scalability, and reliability of storage services that support critical containerized workloads running on OpenShift.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, configure, and maintain large-scale Ceph clusters (RBD, CephFS, RGW) integrated with on-premises OpenShift.
• Administer and optimize OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) for on-prem OpenShift clusters, including StorageClasses, PersistentVolumes, and CSI drivers.
• Perform day-to-day operations: capacity planning, performance tuning, monitoring, troubleshooting, upgrades, and incident resolution.
• Manage storage lifecycle activities — provisioning, replication, erasure coding, snapshots, backups, and disaster recovery — in an on-premises environment.
• Integrate and maintain Ceph/ODF with OpenShift platform components, networking, and underlying infrastructure (servers, networking, hypervisors if applicable).
• Develop and maintain automation (Ansible, Python, shell scripts) for storage provisioning, configuration management, and operational tasks.
• Ensure security, compliance, data protection, and best practices for on-prem storage environments.
• Collaborate closely with OpenShift platform, infrastructure, and application teams to support storage requirements for production workloads.
• Create and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, and operational procedures

Required Skills & Experience

• Strong hands-on experience administering Ceph clusters in production (cluster management, OSDs, MONs, MGRs, performance tuning, upgrades, and troubleshooting).
• Proven experience with OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) / Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage in on-premises environments.
• Solid background in enterprise storage administration (block, file, and object storage) for on-prem infrastructure.
• Experience with OpenShift/Kubernetes storage concepts: CSI drivers, PersistentVolumes, PersistentVolumeClaims, StorageClasses, and dynamic provisioning.
• Strong Linux system administration skills and understanding of storage-related networking (including on-prem networking considerations).
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools commonly used with Ceph and OpenShift (Prometheus, Grafana, Ceph Dashboard, etc.).
• Familiarity with automation and infrastructure-as-code tools (Ansible preferred, Terraform, etc.).
• Proven troubleshooting skills in complex distributed storage systems running on bare-metal or virtualized on-prem infrastructure.

Preferred Qualifications

• Red Hat certifications (RHCE, OpenShift Administration, or storage-related credentials).
• Experience managing multi-node / multi-rack Ceph clusters in on-prem data centers.
• Knowledge of high-availability architectures, multi-site replication, and disaster recovery strategies for Ceph/ODF.
• Experience with underlying hardware (servers, storage media, networking) in on-prem environments.
• Scripting/programming skills (Python, Bash).
• Exposure to other enterprise storage platforms is a plus.