Infrastructure Engineer (OpenStack Ironic Specialist)

About the Role

We’re hiring an Infrastructure Engineer (OpenStack Ironic Specialist) to design, operate, and continuously improve the bare metal provisioning platforms that underpin Nscale’s infrastructure. This role centers on OpenStack Ironic, automated hardware lifecycle management, and the reliable operation of large-scale physical infrastructure. You’ll work across network, compute, data center, and support teams and contribute to upstream OpenStack communities to align our bare metal platforms with real operational needs. What You'll Do

• Design scalable and resilient bare metal provisioning platforms with a strong focus on OpenStack Ironic.

• Own the full lifecycle of physical infrastructure, including discovery, enrolment, provisioning, cleaning, deprovisioning, and hardware state management.

• Build and maintain provisioning workflows for a wide range of hardware profiles, including GPU-enabled and high-performance server platforms.

• Support platform upgrades, lifecycle management, and operational improvements across Ironic and its dependencies.

• Manage and improve integrations between Ironic and related OpenStack services such as Nova, Neutron, Glance, Keystone, and Placement.

• Drive automation for hardware onboarding, firmware and BIOS configuration, deployment workflows, validation, and recovery.

• Implement infrastructure automation using infrastructure-as-code and configuration management approaches.

• Ensure provisioning platforms and operational processes align with security, compliance, and operational standards.

• Troubleshoot complex issues across provisioning pipelines, PXE/iPXE, BMC interfaces, out-of-band management, image deployment, network boot, and hardware compatibility.

• Act as a 3rd/4th line escalation point for advanced bare metal and provisioning incidents.

• Perform root cause analysis and implement long-term fixes to improve platform reliability and repeatability.

• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response activities.

• Collaborate with network, compute, data center, and support teams to deliver reliable physical infrastructure services.

• Contribute specialist input to infrastructure roadmap planning, capacity expansion, standard builds, and hardware platform qualification.

• Support pre-sales and solution design efforts with expert guidance on bare metal capabilities, operational models, and deployment constraints.

• Contribute to upstream OpenStack bare metal communities through bug reports, testing, reviews, design discussions, and code contributions where appropriate.

• Track upstream roadmaps and release changes to help shape Nscale’s bare metal strategy, upgrade planning, and platform standards. What We're Looking For

• Strong experience operating Linux systems and troubleshooting production infrastructure.

• Strong specialist knowledge of OpenStack Ironic and the surrounding provisioning ecosystem.

• Strong understanding of bare metal provisioning concepts including PXE/iPXE, DHCP, TFTP/HTTP boot, BMC technologies, RAID configuration, firmware management, disk imaging, and node lifecycle states.

• Strong experience with out-of-band management technologies such as Redfish, IPMI, or vendor management interfaces.

• Strong experience designing and building automation for physical and virtual infrastructure using tools such as Ansible.

• Strong scripting skills in Python and Bash.

• Experience troubleshooting complex provisioning and hardware integration issues across server, network, and management layers.

• Experience operating infrastructure at scale with a focus on reliability, repeatability, and operational safety.

• Ability to collaborate across infrastructure, support, and architecture teams to solve complex technical problems.

• Experience contributing to or working closely with upstream open-source communities, particularly OpenStack, Ironic, Metal3, or related projects, is highly desirable. Nice to Have

• Experience contributing to upstream OpenStack communities (OpenStack, Ironic, Metal3) is highly desirable. Compensation & Benefits

• Highly competitive US compensation package (base + bonus + equity), with performance reviews every 12 months.