OpenStack Engineer (Contract)

OpenStack Engineer

Do you want to tackle the biggest questions in finance with near infinite compute power at your fingertips?

G-Research is a leading quantitative research and technology firm, with offices in London and Dallas. We are proud to employ some of the best people in their field and to nurture their talent in a dynamic, flexible and highly stimulating culture where world-beating ideas are cultivated and rewarded.

This is a role based in our new Soho Place office – opened in 2023 - in the heart of Central London and home to our Research Lab.

The Role 

As an OpenStack Engineer, you'll be at the forefront of delivering our cutting-edge on-premises cloud platform, powered by OpenStack. You'll play a crucial role in designing, building and supporting this platform, driving its adoption and expansion. Collaboration is key, and you'll work closely with Linux Engineers, Developers, Security experts and other infrastructure teams. 

Our engineering efforts prioritize automation, Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD tools and IaC methodologies. By leveraging open source tooling and best practices, we aim to accelerate delivery and foster a culture of Continuous Improvement throughout the organization. Join us and be part of a team at the forefront of private cloud computing.

Key responsibilities of the role include: 

• Designing, deploying and maintaining a highly scalable and secure cloud platform 
• Ensuring workloads running on the private cloud platform are deployed optimally 
• Recommending and implementing continuous improvements to the platform 
• Contributing to the upstream OpenStack open source project 
• Performing diagnostics and tuning 
• Capacity planning to ensure seamless scale-out without impacting services and to meet the growing demands of the business 
• Security hardening the platforms and supporting systems 
• Being an evangelist of the platform, liaising with users to gather feedback, providing support and working on feature requests 
• Mentoring junior team members 

You will be part of an exciting and challenging work environment, working with some of the best engineers in the industry. You will benefit from investment in technology, training, conference attendance, career development and cross-team growth opportunities. 

Who are we looking for?  

The ideal candidate will have the following skills and experience: 

• Over five years of experience with OpenStack in production environments 
• Experience managing and operating CEPH Storage clusters 
• Expertise in architecting, managing and upgrading large-scale OpenStack deployments 
• Strong Linux skills with excellent troubleshooting abilities 
• Advanced proficiency in infrastructure automation tools such as Ansible and Terraform 
• Expertise in at least one programming language, with a preference for Python 
• A solid understanding of networking concepts and protocols 
• Strong knowledge of CI/CD and/or VCS tools, such as Jenkins and Git 
• Familiarity with container technologies, including Docker and Kubernetes 
• Good knowledge of server hardware, including BMC/Redfish 

Beneficial but not required  

• Experience with Kolla Ansible or similar OpenStack deployment tools 
• Bare metal provisioning experience using Ironic or MaaS 
• Experience with Hashicorp products, in particular with Vault and Terraform 
• Experience deploying and managing HPC clusters 
• Experience with Infiniband  
• SRE experience and the ability to able to implement effective monitoring solutions, SLIs and SLOs