Storage and Datacenter Team Lead

Responsibilities

Leadership & Team Management

• Lead a small team of storage, database, and systems administrators, including mentorship, performance management, and career development.
• Coordinate datacenter operations across production and research facilities, including site-work scheduling and vendor or contractor visits.
• Align team priorities with organizational goals and ensure timely project delivery.
• Participate in hiring to grow and evolve the storage engineering team.
• Coordinate on-call schedules and maintain effective incident-response processes.

Technical & Operational Oversight

• Architect, implement, and maintain highly available, performant storage systems.
• Define and drive automation strategies for storage deployment and monitoring.
• Oversee storage lifecycle management, including capacity planning, performance tuning, archiving, backups, and data protection for large-scale datasets.
• Provide architectural guidance and hands-on support for Ceph at PB scale.
• Oversee physical datacenter infrastructure, including rack layout, power distribution, cooling systems, and space, power, and cooling capacity forecasting.
• Manage equipment installation and decommissioning.
• Collaborate with networking, virtualization, research, and application teams to support compute and storage needs.
• Improve CI/CD and configuration-management processes using tools such as Ansible and Git.
• Support database operations through database tuning, storage optimization, and collaboration with developers.
• Develop runbooks for remote-hands work and coordinate onsite operations with contractors and facilities personnel.

IC-Level Engineering & Troubleshooting

• Serve as an escalation point for distributed filesystems, databases, and high-performance storage infrastructure.
• Administer Linux servers, network-attached storage, virtualization platforms, and cluster frameworks.
• Install, cable, and troubleshoot physical server, storage, and network hardware in rack environments.
• Diagnose and resolve hardware-level issues affecting production systems.
• Support and enhance observability using Prometheus, Grafana, and related tools.

Requirements

• 5+ years of Linux systems administration experience, with significant recent focus on storage systems.
• 2+ years of team leadership, technical project management, or mentoring experience.
• Knowledge of distributed storage systems such as Ceph and storage technologies including RAID, SAN, and NAS.
• Experience streamlining data lifecycle processes, including archiving, backup, and retention of PB-scale data.
• Hands-on experience with colocated datacenter infrastructure.
• Ability to travel to remote datacenter sites as needed.
• Strong scripting or development experience in Bash and/or Python.
• Experience with Ansible and infrastructure automation.
• Familiarity with monitoring and alerting systems such as Nagios, CheckMK, Prometheus, and Grafana.
• Understanding of virtualization technologies including KVM and ESXi, and containerization technologies including Docker and Podman.
• Knowledge of LDAP, IPA, AD, and centralized identity management.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Kubernetes container orchestration.
• PostgreSQL DBA experience.
• Experience in a high-throughput research or trading environment.
• Exposure to RHEL, CentOS, or Rocky Linux in enterprise settings.
• Experience with DCIM tools for tracking assets, power, and space.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps principles.
• Experience managing colocation vendor relationships and SLAs.