Software Engineer Compute and Storage (Contractor)

Position: Software Engineer Compute and Storage (Contractor)

Role Description

This role is a contract assignment at Palo Alto Networks. Contractors will not be employed by Palo Alto Networks but through our trusted staffing partners.

• Environment: On-Premises Private Cloud (Bare Metal / VMware)
• Software Engineer: OpenShift Platform
• Duration - 12 months
• Job Location - Bangalore, India<HYBRID/ 3 days in office>

Job Description

Role Overview 🚀

As an L1 Software Engineer for our On-Prem OpenShift fleet, you are the guardian of cluster health and resource efficiency. You will support the end-to-end lifecycle of OpenShift clusters from initial build-out to day-to-day operations while ensuring our physical compute and storage assets are utilized to their maximum potential.

Roles and Responsibilities

1. Cluster Build-out & Lifecycle Operations 🏗️

• Node Provisioning: Assist in the automated deployment and scaling of OpenShift worker nodes on bare metal or virtualized infrastructure.
• Cluster Expansion: Participate in adding compute/storage capacity to existing clusters based on demand, ensuring new nodes meet baseline performance and security standards.
• Patching & Upgrades: Support L2/L3 engineers during cluster version upgrades and security patching, performing pre-flight checks and post-upgrade validation.

2. Resource Hygiene & Capacity Optimization 📉

• Quota Management: Monitor and enforce Resource Quotas and Limit Ranges across namespaces to prevent "noisy neighbor" syndromes and resource hoarding.
• Waste Identification: Identify and reclaim "Zombie" resources, such as orphaned Persistent Volumes (PVs), idle pods, and unused namespaces that are consuming physical hardware capacity.
• Density Tuning: Analyze pod packing and node utilization to recommend adjustments that increase container density, delaying the need for additional physical hardware purchases.

3. Incident Management & OCP Triage 🚨

• Alert Triage: Respond to alerts from the OpenShift Monitoring stack (Prometheus/Grafana) regarding Node pressure (Disk, Memory, PID), Etcd health, and API server latency.
• First-Level Troubleshooting: Resolve common L1 issues like Image Pull BackOff, Pending pods due to resource constraints, and stuck Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs).
• Shift Readiness: Maintain a seamless handoff of cluster health status, documenting any hardware failures or degraded storage arrays for the incoming shift.

Technical Skillset (The Toolkit)

Category : Tools & Skills

Orchestration: Red Hat OpenShift (OCP), Kubernetes (K8s) primitives.

Infrastructure: Knowledge of Linux (RHEL/CoreOS), VMware, or Bare Metal PXE booting.

Storage: Understanding of CSI drivers, ODF (OpenShift Data Foundation), or Ceph.

Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenShift Logging (EFK/Loki).

CLI Proficiency: Expert-level use of oc and kubectl command-line tools.

Requirements added by the job poster

• 1+ years of work experience with Red Hat Linux