About this role
Senior Apache CloudStack Engineer – Infrastructure Implementation
Location: Ireland Contract Type: Contract Day Rate: Competitive, dependent on experience
Role Overview
We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Apache CloudStack Engineer to support the design, build and implementation of a new CloudStack-based virtualisation and private cloud infrastructure platform.
The organisation delivers technology solutions and infrastructure services to a range of public-sector clients and is investing in open-source infrastructure technologies as an alternative to traditional VMware environments.
This is a hands-on technical engineering role requiring strong practical expertise in Apache CloudStack, Linux-based virtualisation, KVM and the supporting networking and storage infrastructure.
The successful candidate will play a key role in establishing new CloudStack environments, integrating underlying infrastructure components and ensuring the resulting platform is secure, scalable, resilient and suitable for enterprise production workloads.
We are particularly interested in engineers who have previously built CloudStack environments from the ground up, rather than those whose experience is limited to administering existing platforms.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead or contribute to the hands-on installation, configuration and implementation of new Apache CloudStack environments.
- Build and configure KVM-based virtualisation infrastructure, including Linux hosts, QEMU and libvirt.
- Configure Apache CloudStack management servers, zones, pods, clusters, hosts and system virtual machines.
- Integrate the underlying compute, storage and networking infrastructure required to support production cloud environments.
- Configure CloudStack networking, including guest networks, VLANs, virtual routing, firewall rules, IP addressing and network isolation.
- Implement and configure primary and secondary storage solutions using appropriate technologies such as Ceph, NFS or iSCSI.
- Establish virtual machine provisioning, templates, snapshots and resource allocation processes.
- Implement and validate high availability, backup, disaster recovery and infrastructure resilience capabilities.
- Support technical design decisions relating to infrastructure architecture, performance, scalability, capacity and security.
- Develop and implement infrastructure automation using Ansible, Terraform, Python, Bash or similar technologies.
- Troubleshoot complex infrastructure issues across CloudStack, Linux, KVM, networking and storage.
- Support infrastructure testing, performance optimisation, security hardening and production readiness.
- Contribute to technical documentation, configuration standards, deployment procedures and operational handover.
- Collaborate with infrastructure architects, network engineers, storage specialists and other technical stakeholders.
- Support VMware-to-KVM migration planning and implementation activities where required.
- Help establish repeatable deployment approaches and engineering standards for future infrastructure implementations.
Essential Skills & Experience
- Proven hands-on experience implementing Apache CloudStack in production or enterprise environments.
- Demonstrable experience building and configuring CloudStack infrastructure from initial installation through to operational readiness.
- Strong Linux systems engineering experience, particularly Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Rocky Linux, Ubuntu or similar distributions.
- Advanced hands-on knowledge of KVM, QEMU and libvirt virtualisation.
- Strong understanding of virtualisation architecture, hypervisor configuration, compute resource management and virtual machine lifecycle operations.
- Solid practical networking experience covering TCP/IP, VLANs, routing, bridging, firewalls and virtual networking.
- Experience integrating and troubleshooting enterprise storage solutions, including technologies such as Ceph, NFS or iSCSI.
- Understanding of infrastructure high availability, resilience, performance and disaster recovery.
- Experience automating infrastructure configuration and provisioning using scripting and infrastructure-as-code tools.
- Strong infrastructure troubleshooting capabilities across compute, network, storage and operating system layers.
- Ability to work independently, take ownership of technical engineering activities and deliver solutions into production.
Desirable Skills & Experience
- Experience migrating virtualisation environments from VMware ESXi/vCenter to KVM and Apache CloudStack.
- Experience implementing private cloud infrastructure for public-sector or regulated organisations.
- Experience designing or implementing multi-tenant cloud environments.
- Knowledge of cloud security, network segmentation, access controls and infrastructure compliance.
- Experience with CloudStack APIs, CloudMonkey, Terraform providers and Ansible automation.
- Experience with Ceph distributed storage or software-defined networking.
- Familiarity with OpenStack or other open-source cloud infrastructure platforms.
- Experience creating repeatable infrastructure deployment patterns or standardised cloud platform builds.
- Relevant Linux certifications, such as RHCSA or RHCE.
Candidate Profile
The ideal candidate is a highly capable, hands-on infrastructure engineer with demonstrable experience delivering new Apache CloudStack implementations.
They will have a strong understanding of the complete infrastructure stack and be comfortable working independently across Linux, KVM, networking, storage and cloud orchestration.
We are particularly interested in engineers who can demonstrate ownership of previous CloudStack deployments, explain the technical decisions made during implementation and provide examples of successfully bringing complex infrastructure into production.
Practical engineering capability, problem-solving and proven implementation experience will be prioritised over formal certifications.