Server Engineer

TrueNorth ITG is hiring a Senior Server Engineer to own the health, growth, and resilience of its Proxmox and Ceph virtualization platform and supporting backend infrastructure. The role designs, deploys, and operates virtualization, storage, backup, networking, and security systems; performs hardware and data center operations; and supports monitoring, documentation, incident response, and recovery.

Responsibilities:

• Design, deploy, upgrade and troubleshoot Proxmox VE clusters end to end, from bare metal through corosync, HA and production cutover
• Architect and operate Ceph: CRUSH maps, device classes and pools, OSD lifecycle, PG tuning, rebalancing, capacity planning and failure recovery
• Manage ZFS pools, caching and tuning for local and backup storage
• Plan and execute live migrations, cross-cluster moves, PCIe/GPU passthrough and version upgrades with minimal downtime
• Build and maintain standard VM templates, automation and provisioning workflows
• Operate Proxmox Backup Server, including per-customer pools, pool-based jobs, retention, verification and prune/GC schedules
• Run regular restore tests and maintain documented, tested recovery procedures for each client
• Monitor backup health and capacity, and resolve failures before they become data-loss events
• Maintain the supporting stack: Active Directory and DNS, monitoring (Zabbix), Docker-based services and internal tooling
• Respond to alerts, perform root cause analysis and write clear post-incident reports
• Travel to data centers for hardware installs, replacements and upgrades, including servers, drives, NICs, memory and power components
• Diagnose and repair hardware faults across Gigabyte, Supermicro, Dell, HP and other OEM platforms, and manage vendor RMAs and support cases
• Rack, cable, label and document new deployments to a consistent standard
• Configure and troubleshoot routed and switched networks using OSPF, BGP, VLANs, LACP and SD-WAN
• Administer edge firewalls on Cisco ASA, Netgate/pfSense and FortiGate, including policy, VPN and segmentation changes
• Work with network and security teammates on changes that touch cluster and storage traffic
• Keep runbooks, network diagrams and asset records accurate and current
• Participate in change control, capacity planning and on-call rotation
• Mentor junior staff and support other engineers on escalations

Requirements:

• 5+ years running Proxmox VE and KVM in production, including multi-node clusters, HA and live migration
• Deep, hands-on Ceph experience: you have built clusters from scratch, tuned them under load and recovered them from real failures
• Strong ZFS knowledge: pool design, ARC/L2ARC/SLOG, replication and performance tuning
• Able to design and deploy a complete cluster alone, and to explain how compute, storage, network and backup layers interact
• Strong Linux administration (Debian preferred) and Bash or Python scripting
• Working knowledge of OSPF and BGP in production environments
• VLAN design, trunking, LACP/bonding and MTU/jumbo frame configuration for storage networks
• General SD-WAN experience
• Ability to troubleshoot Layer 2 and Layer 3 problems with packet captures and switch/router CLI tools
• Experience with Cisco, Meraki or similar enterprise platforms
• Hands-on experience building, servicing and upgrading rack servers from Gigabyte, Supermicro, Dell, HP and other OEMs
• Comfort with IPMI/iDRAC/iLO, firmware and BIOS updates, RAID/HBA and NVMe configuration, and hardware diagnostics
• Physical data center skills: racking, cabling, power and labeling
• Experience administering Cisco ASA, Netgate/pfSense and FortiGate firewalls
• Firewall policy, NAT, site-to-site and remote-access VPN, and network segmentation
• Clear written and verbal communication, including documenting your own work
• Ability to work independently in a fast-moving, multi-client environment
• Experience with Proxmox Backup Server at scale, including pool-based job design and tiered NVMe/HDD backup targets
• Experience with mixed-media Ceph clusters (NVMe and HDD tiers) and cross-cluster or cross-site migration
• PCIe and GPU passthrough experience, including GPU nodes for AI workloads
• Windows Server, Active Directory and Group Policy administration
• Automation and infrastructure-as-code experience (Ansible, Terraform, Python, REST APIs)
• Monitoring experience with Zabbix, Grafana or similar tools
• Prior MSP or multi-tenant hosting experience
• Basic healthcare IT knowledge, such as HIPAA-aware operations and the uptime and data-integrity demands of clinical systems
• Relevant certifications, such as CCNA/CCNP, Fortinet NSE, Linux (LPIC, RHCE) or Proxmox certification
• Willingness to travel and to join an on-call rotation