Senior Storage Solutions Engineer

About Us :

Platform9: A Better Way to Go Cloud Native

Platform9 is a leader in simplifying enterprise private clouds. Our flagship product, Private Cloud Director, turns existing infrastructure into a full-featured private cloud. Enterprise IT teams can manage VMs and containers with familiar GUI tools and automated APIs in a private, secure environment.

Enterprises are selecting Platform9's Private Cloud Director to migrate away from legacy virtualization platforms because it meets all of the following enterprise requirements:
- Familiar VM management experience
- Critical enterprise virtualization features: HA, DRR, networking, scale, reliability
- Compatibility with all existing hardware environments, including 3rd-party storage
- Automated migration tooling that lowers cost barrier by 10x

Platform9 was founded by a team of VMware cloud pioneers and has over 30,000 nodes in production at some of the world's largest enterprises, including Cloudera, EBSCO, Juniper Networks, and Rackspace. Platform9 is an inclusive, globally distributed company backed by prominent investors, committed to driving private cloud innovation and efficiency.

Position Overview

We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Storage Solutions Engineer to join our Professional Services organization. This individual will serve as a trusted advisor and technical expert on storage architectures and integrations for both our internal Systems Integrations team and Engineering teams.

The ideal candidate will bring 15 years of hands-on storage expertise across multiple technologies and vendors, with proven experience in designing, integrating, and optimizing storage solutions in complex enterprise environments. This role will also partner with PreSales engineers during customer engagements to provide deep technical counsel on storage-related topics and will create best practice documentation and knowledge base articles for internal and external audiences.

Key Responsibilities

1. Technical Leadership & Advisory

• Provide expert storage guidance to Professional Services' Systems Integrations team for deploying Private Cloud Director (PCD) with various storage backends.
• Collaborate closely with Engineering teams to inform design decisions and troubleshoot complex storage-related issues.
• Advise PreSales engineers during customer solution design, POCs, and RFP responses on optimal storage approaches.

2. Solution Design & Integration

• Deep expertise in backup and disaster recovery (DR) solutions, including architecture design, implementation strategies, integrations, best practices, and operational patterns.
• Design and document best practice architectures for integrating PCD with diverse storage solutions, including Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, S3, VMware RDM, and others like InfiniBand.
• Guide and support integrations with vendor-specific storage solutions, ensuring performance, reliability, and scalability.
• Participate in solution validation, lab testing, and reference architecture development.

3. Documentation & Knowledge Sharing

• Develop and maintain internal best practice guides for storage-related topics relevant to OpenStack and PCD.
• Create external customer-facing guides and knowledge base articles to improve deployment success and reduce support escalations.
• Conduct technical enablement sessions for Professional Services, PreSales, and Support teams.

4. Continuous Improvement & Innovation

• Stay current with evolving storage technologies, protocols, and best practices in cloud infrastructure.
• Partner with Engineering to identify product enhancements that improve storage interoperability and performance.
• Proactively suggest improvements to Professional Services' delivery methodologies for storage integration.

• 15 years of enterprise storage expertise, with hands-on experience across multiple vendor ecosystems and technologies.
• Deep knowledge of storage protocols and architectures, including Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS and S3.
• Ability to troubleshoot complex storage performance and connectivity issues across multi-vendor environments.
• Strong understanding of VMware environments, including vSphere and storage connectivity options.

• Experience developing automation scripts or tools for storage provisioning and integration (Python, Ansible, PowerShell, etc.).
• Proven experience in system integration projects involving storage systems.
• Experience with OpenStack storage services (Cinder, Swift, Manila) and their integration with vendor solutions.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes persistent storage concepts.
• Experience authoring technical whitepapers or reference architectures.
• Vendor certifications (e.g., NetApp NCIE, EMC Proven Professional, HPE ASE, Pure Storage, VMware VCAP-DCA, Red Hat OpenStack) are a strong plus.

• Strong communication and presentation skills for both technical and executive audiences.
• Ability to work independently while collaborating effectively across multiple teams.
• Passion for technology, continuous learning, and mentoring peers.
• Exceptional problem-solving skills and a customer-first mindset.

• Work with cutting-edge storage and virtualization technologies.