Ceph Storage DevOps Engineer (IT-SD-GSS-2025-164-GRAE)

Your responsibilities

Are you an enthusiastic engineer eager to join the Storage & Data Management group with more than 1 Exabyte of storage at your fingertips?

As a DevOps engineer, you will join CERN's IT Department in the Ceph team, which is responsible for providing highly-available and reliable block, object, and file storage to address the storage needs of CERN's Cloud Infrastructure and its community of users.

Your main activities will consist of:

• Operate PB-scale production clusters across multiple data centres;
• Improve service operations and documentation, and implement automation for continuous service improvement and reduction of toil;
• Validate, plan, and deploy new features and new releases of Ceph;
• Design and deploy Ceph-based storage services according to users' requirements and industry best practices to maximise service availability and reliability;
• Contribute fixes and features to the upstream Ceph code base for long-term maintainability;
• Test, evaluate, and implement disaster recovery features according to the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery objectives of the Organisation.

We offer the opportunity to develop strong expertise in performance and reliability engineering on the Linux platform, exposure to PB-scale infrastructure management, and the chance to hone your programming skills in an exciting environment.

You will be a member of the service operations team and rota, which may be required to perform interventions outside of standard working hours, including nights, Sundays and official holidays.

Your profile

Skills:

The successful candidate must have demonstrated experience in the following fields:

• Linux system administration (Enterprise Linux and derivatives);
• Shell scripting and Python software programming;
• Source code control and versioning systems (e.g., Git);
• Genuine interest and curiosity in tackling complex problems and in pushing technology forward.

Additional experience in the following fields would be an asset:

• Distributed systems and software-defined storage;
• Monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana);
• Contributions to big open-source projects;
• C++ development, including software building, packaging, and backports of fixes and patches;
• Cloud computing environments and DevOps tools (e.g., OpenStack, Kubernetes containers, CI/CD automation, etc);
• Backup tools and best practices (e.g., Restic, S3 object storage, tape-based archival);
• Configuration management and change control systems (e.g., Puppet, Ansible, Terraform);
• Spoken and written English, with a commitment to learn French.

Eligibility criteria:

• You are a national of a CERN Member or Associate Member State.
• By the application deadline, you have a maximum of two years of professional experience since graduation in Computing or physical sciences (or a related field) and your highest educational qualification is either a Bachelor's or Master's degree.
• You have never had a CERN fellow or graduate contract before.
• Applicants without University degree are not eligible.
• Applicants with a PhD are not eligible.

Job closing date: 29.09.2025 at 23:59 CEST.

Contract duration: 24 months, with a possible extension up to 36 months maximum.

Working hours: 40 hours per week

Target start date: 01-December-2025

This position involves:

• Stand-by duty, when required by the needs of the Organisation.
• Work during nights, Sundays and official holidays, when required by the needs of the Organisation.

Job reference: IT-SD-GSS-2025-164-GRAE

Field of work: Software Engineering and IT

What we offer

• A monthly stipend ranging between 5196 and 5716 Swiss Francs (net of tax).
• Coverage by CERN's comprehensive health scheme (for yourself, your spouse and children), and membership of the CERN Pension Fund.
• Depending on your individual circumstances: installation grant; family, child and infant allowances; payment of travel expenses at the beginning and end of contract.
• 30 days of paid leave per year.
• On-the-job and formal training at CERN as well as in-house language courses for English and/or French.

About us

At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. Using the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments, they study the basic constituents of matter - fundamental particles that are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives physicists clues about how particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature. Find out more on http://home.cern.

Diversity has been an integral part of CERN's mission since its foundation and is an established value of the Organization. Employing a diverse workforce is central to our success.