Infrastructure Engineer (OpenStack Neutron Specialist)

Nscale

11d•$150,000 - $220,000•Remote

About The Position

Nscale is seeking an Infrastructure Engineer with a specialization in OpenStack Neutron to join their Infrastructure Engineering team. This role is crucial for the design, implementation, operation, and continuous improvement of the infrastructure stack, with a specific focus on the OpenStack networking layer. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in Neutron and related technologies such as OVN, Open vSwitch, routing, DHCP, and network automation. This position is key to ensuring the availability, scalability, performance, and security of Nscale's cloud platforms and involves active participation in the upstream OpenStack community. The team is responsible for maintaining high levels of availability, scalability, automation, and security, and acts as a third/fourth line escalation point for support organizations, providing subject matter expertise to various internal groups.

Requirements

Strong Linux systems administration and troubleshooting experience.
Deep hands-on experience deploying, operating, upgrading, and troubleshooting large-scale OpenStack environments.
Strong specialist knowledge of Neutron, including ML2, OVN, Open vSwitch, routing, DHCP, metadata, provider networks, tenant networks, VLAN/VXLAN/Geneve, and security groups.
Strong understanding of Linux networking concepts including routing, bridging, namespaces, iptables/nftables, bonding, MTU, and packet flow analysis.
Strong experience investigating complex network behaviour using diagnostic and observability tools such as tcpdump, iproute2, ovs/ovn tooling, logs, and metrics.
Strong experience designing and building automation for cloud infrastructure using tools such as Ansible.
Strong Python and Bash skills.
Experience working with highly available production platforms and change management in mission-critical environments.
Ability to collaborate across infrastructure, support, and architecture teams to solve complex technical problems.
Ability to evaluate upstream changes, influence technical direction, and translate community developments into practical outcomes for production platforms.
Ensuring OpenStack networking platforms adhere to security, compliance, and operational standards.
Participating in on-call rotations and incident response activities for critical infrastructure services.

Nice To Haves

Experience contributing to or working closely with upstream open-source communities is highly desirable, particularly within OpenStack, Neutron, OVN, Open vSwitch, or related networking projects.
Experience with OpenStack networking at scale in service provider, private cloud, or high-performance infrastructure environments is highly desirable.
Experience with BGP, EVPN, load balancing, or network services integration in OpenStack environments would be beneficial.

Responsibilities

Designing, implementing, and operating scalable, resilient, and secure OpenStack networking platforms, with a strong focus on Neutron and OVN/OVS.
Owning the architecture and day-to-day operation of virtual networking services, including L2/L3 networking, DHCP, metadata, floating IP, NAT, security groups, and tenant segmentation.
Troubleshooting complex control plane and data plane issues across OpenStack networking components and the underlying Linux networking stack.
Driving continuous improvement in network automation, provisioning, validation, monitoring, and recovery using infrastructure-as-code and configuration management tools.
Working closely with compute, storage, and platform engineering teams to ensure seamless integration between Neutron and the wider OpenStack ecosystem.
Leading performance tuning, scalability planning, and resilience improvements for network-heavy and latency-sensitive cloud workloads.
Acting as a 3rd/4th line escalation point for advanced networking incidents, conducting root cause analysis, and driving permanent fixes.
Supporting upgrades, lifecycle management, and change execution across OpenStack networking services with a strong focus on service continuity and operational excellence.
Contributing specialist input to infrastructure roadmap planning, platform standards, and solution design for customer and internal environments.
Supporting pre-sales and solution design activities by providing expert guidance on cloud networking capabilities, constraints, and best practices.
Contributing to upstream OpenStack networking communities, particularly Neutron and related projects such as OVN, through bug reports, code contributions, design discussions, testing, and reviews where appropriate.
Tracking upstream roadmaps, release changes, and community direction to help shape Nscale's networking strategy, upgrade planning, and platform standards.
Representing Nscale's operational requirements and real-world use cases in upstream discussions to help drive improvements that benefit both the business and the broader community.
Ensuring OpenStack networking platforms adhere to security, compliance, and operational standards.
Participating in on-call rotations and incident response activities for critical infrastructure services.