Bare Metal OpenStack Engineer (IT-CD-CLI-2026-179-GRAE)

Are you passionate about infrastructure at scale and curious about how bare metal servers are managed across a fleet of 10'000 nodes? Join CERN's IT Cloud team and help run and evolve the OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure that underpins most CERN and LHC experiment services.

In this role, you will work at the intersection of systems engineering and software development, contributing to the life-cycle management of physical servers (from delivery and burn-in to provisioning and phase-out) using OpenStack Ironic.

You will collaborate closely with senior engineers, the upstream OpenStack community, and CERN's diverse user communities, gaining deep hands-on experience with bare metal provisioning, BMC protocols, and Python development in a large-scale production environment.

If you enjoy working close to the hardware, contributing to open-source projects, and solving real operational challenges at scale, come join us!

Your responsibilities

• Run and help evolve CERN IT's OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure.
• Maintain and develop the bare metal life-cycle management framework built on OpenStack Ironic: integrate new server deliveries, provision nodes to user communities, and maintain tooling for burn-in, stress-testing and phase-out.
• Contribute to the upstream OpenStack/Ironic code base, leveraging CERN's links with the open-source community.
• Collaborate on automation and tooling improvements using Python and configuration management systems.

Your profile

• Experience administering or working with Linux systems in a server or data-centre environment.
• Experience writing Python scripts or applications for automation or systems tasks.
• Familiarity with configuration management tools such as Puppet or Ansible is a plus.
• Experience with bare metal server management, BMC protocols (IPMI, Redfish) or hardware provisioning workflows is a plus.
• Contributions to open-source projects or upstream communities is a plus.

Skills

• Strong knowledge of the Linux operating system.
• Experience with git version control.
• Programming experience in Python.
• Interest in bare metal infrastructure and hardware life-cycle management.
• Familiarity with configuration management systems (e.g. Puppet or Ansible) is a plus.
• Experience with management of physical servers or BMC protocols such as IPMI or Redfish is a plus.
• Ability to collaborate in a multidisciplinary, international team and communicate clearly.
• 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 Computer Science or a related field (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.