[Hiring] Senior Lab Reliability Engineer @VAST Data

Role Description

VAST is building out a Presales Platform team responsible for the tooling, automation, and infrastructure that enables our field engineering organization to demonstrate value at scale. Our lab is a core asset for evaluations, demos, and internal enablement, and we're building a team whose job is to keep it running at production-quality reliability. This role holds the senior technical ownership on that team.

• Own the operational reliability of VAST clusters in the lab environment, including proactive health monitoring, upgrade planning, and issue resolution.
• Serve as the primary technical escalation point for complex cluster issues, working hands-on-keyboard to resolve them and partnering with VAST engineering when deeper investigation is needed.
• Shape the automation and tooling strategy for the lab environment, including provisioning scripts, CLI utilities, monitoring dashboards, and internal tooling that the rest of the team builds on.
• Help establish standards for infrastructure-as-code and configuration management (Ansible or equivalent) across the lab environment.
• Reproduce and isolate difficult issues in controlled lab environments, producing high-quality diagnostic data and reports for engineering.
• Own broader systems infrastructure supporting the lab, including virtualization platforms (VMware vSphere, Proxmox), compute, networking, and storage.
• Mentor and support other members of the lab operations team, raising the collective technical bar.
• Partner with pre-sales SEs, professional services, and engineering to reproduce customer-relevant scenarios and validate solutions in the lab.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of professional experience in a systems engineering, storage engineering, customer support engineering, or related role.
• Deep hands-on experience with enterprise storage systems (VAST, Pure, NetApp, Isilon, Ceph, or similar) at an operational or reliability level.
• Strong Linux systems administration skills, including networking, storage, filesystems, systemd, and CLI tooling.
• Strong scripting/programming experience (Python, Bash, or similar), sufficient to build and maintain automation and tooling other engineers rely on.
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes in operational environments.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code or configuration management tools (Ansible or equivalent).
• Solid networking foundations (VLANs, routing, subnetting, network troubleshooting).
• Experience with virtualization platforms (VMware vSphere, ESXi, Proxmox, or equivalent).
• Methodical approach to troubleshooting complex issues across storage, networking, and compute layers.
• Comfort working across timezones with distributed team members.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including ability to produce clear technical documentation and reports.

Preferred Qualifications

• Existing hands-on experience with VAST Data clusters.
• Prior experience as a Customer Support Engineer at a storage or infrastructure company OR Reliability Engineer / SRE supporting a wide variety of infrastructure services.
• Familiarity with observability platforms (Grafana, Prometheus, Elasticsearch).
• Network switch administration experience (Cumulus, Arista, Cisco).
• Experience with high-performance computing environments or ML/AI training workloads.

Company Description