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Position Summary:
McGill University is seeking a Systems Administrator, Cloud (OpenStack), to operate, maintain and evolve its research cloud platform within the Advanced Research Computing (ARC) environment.
Reporting to the Associate Director, Operations, the incumbent will be one of three systems administrators on the cloud team, which is part of Calcul Québec's operations team of 14 systems administrators distributed across McGill, Université de Montréal, Université Laval, Université de Sherbrooke and ÉTS.
Calcul Québec is a consortium of Québec universities, of which McGill is a founding member, and a regional partner of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. It provides advanced research computing resources and expertise to research groups across Québec. This role is dedicated to the OpenStack research cloud, which operates alongside HPC clusters, multi-petabyte Lustre parallel storage, and multi-petabyte tape storage for backup and archiving.
Why join us
Run a production cloud used by researchers across Québec and Canada, in a wide range of fields including genomics, climate science, artificial intelligence and the digital humanities.
Work with open-source technologies (OpenStack, Ceph, OVN), with opportunities to contribute upstream.
Join a distributed team of experienced specialists, in a hybrid work arrangement.
Primary Responsibilities:
Operations and support
Ensure the daily operation, availability and performance of the OpenStack platform and its Ceph storage, including CephFS and Rados Gateway.
Provide level 2 and 3 support at the infrastructure level (OpenStack services, virtual networking, and access to Ceph and CephFS storage). The operating systems and applications inside virtual machines remain the users' responsibility.
Tune and optimize the platform so that virtual machines and their storage access run reliably and efficiently.
Diagnose hardware and software problems, working with vendors and colleagues as needed.
Work closely with the Associate Director, Operations, and fellow systems administrators to plan maintenance and coordinate responses to outages and security events, keeping the Associate Director informed to support communication with users.
Platform evolution
Plan and carry out upgrades, patching and lifecycle management of OpenStack, Ceph and CephFS.
Evaluate, pilot and recommend new hardware and software solutions, and contribute to acquisition planning.
Propose improvements to procedures and service quality.
Automation, monitoring and documentation
Automate repetitive tasks and document procedures so that operational work can be shared within the cloud team.
Set up and maintain performance and security monitoring.
Maintain documentation of services, configurations and procedures.
Contribute features and bug fixes to relevant open-source projects.
Collaboration
Work with colleagues across Calcul Québec and the Alliance on regional and national cloud initiatives.
Other Qualifying Skills and/or Abilities
3+ years bachelor’s degree in computer science, Computer Engineering or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience administering production Linux infrastructure at scale (Debian/Ubuntu).
Hands-on experience operating OpenStack in production.
Solid hands-on experience with Ceph administration, including CephFS.
Deployment and configuration with Ansible (openstack-ansible an asset).
Scripting in Bash and Python.
Git-based workflows, including code review.
Knowledge of OVN, Open vSwitch (OVS), VLAN, VXLAN and virtual networking.
Virtualization (libvirt/QEMU-KVM) and Linux containers…