OpenStack Cloud Engineer (IT-CD-CLI-2026-180-GRAE)

Are you passionate about cloud infrastructure and curious about how large-scale services are operated and evolved? Join CERN's IT Cloud team and help run and develop the OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure that underpins most CERN and LHC experiment services. In this role, you will work on the systems and software that provide compute, storage, networking and automation capabilities to thousands of users across the organisation.

You will collaborate closely with experienced engineers, the upstream OpenStack community, and CERN's diverse user communities, gaining hands-on experience operating and evolving one of the world's largest scientific clouds. From service reliability and automation to feature development and large-scale operations, you will help deliver infrastructure that enables cutting-edge research.

If you enjoy solving complex technical challenges, contributing to open-source software, and working with infrastructure at scale, come join us!

Your responsibilities

• Run and help evolve CERN IT's OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure.
• Contribute to the operation and development of cloud services, including compute, storage, networking and related infrastructure components.
• Develop and maintain automation and tooling using Python and configuration management systems.
• Work closely with other IT teams and user communities to design and integrate new capabilities and services.
• Contribute bug fixes and improvements upstream, leveraging CERN's strong links with the OpenStack open-source community.
• Participate in troubleshooting and performance optimisation of large-scale distributed systems.
• Further enhance the service's automation to ensure scalability and manageability.

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 cloud platforms, virtualisation technologies or distributed systems is a plus.
• Experience with configuration management tools such as Puppet or Ansible is a plus.
• Experience with container technologies, CI/CD systems or software-defined networking is a plus.
• Contributions to open-source projects or upstream communities are a plus.

Skills

• Strong knowledge of the Linux operating system.
• Experience with git version control.
• Programming experience in Python.
• Interest in cloud infrastructure and large-scale distributed systems.
• Familiarity with configuration management systems (e.g. Puppet or Ansible) is a plus.
• Understanding of networking concepts and storage technologies 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.