Migration Support Engineer (MES)
Hybrid L1 / L1.5 – Cloud Support & VM Migration | Customer Support SRE
Position Details:
- Location: Romania (remote).
- Engagement: Contractor.
- Compensation: USD 30,000–40,000 per year, commensurate with experience and skills.
About Us:
Platform9: A Better Way to Go Cloud Native
Platform9 is the leader in simplifying enterprise Private Clouds. Founded by a team of VMware cloud pioneers, we are dedicated to transforming IT operations. Our flagship product, Private Cloud Director, turns your existing hardware into a full-featured, future-ready private cloud. We innovate across what we build and how we deliver it, staying focused on a next-generation, open private cloud while holding ourselves to one standard: exceptional customer outcomes.
Enterprises are selecting Platform9 to replace legacy virtualization because it eliminates operational risk and complexity. Private Cloud Director is designed for the experienced infrastructure team, offering a familiar GUI experience for managing VMs and containers, seamless integration with your existing hardware and third-party storage, and critical enterprise features (HA/DR, scale, reliability) built-in. This enables IT teams to gain robust API control and a user experience they trust—rooted in customer obsession and an owner’s mindset. We share context quickly and candidly to keep decisions moving.
With over 30,000 nodes in production at some of the world’s largest enterprises, including Cloudera, EBSCO, Juniper Networks, and Rackspace, Platform9 is the proven path to achieving true vendor independence and operational consistency. We are an inclusive, globally distributed company backed by prominent investors, supported by a partner ecosystem of resellers, systems integrators, MSPs, and technology vendors committed to driving private cloud innovation and efficiency. Our values—innovation, customer obsession, ownership, radical candor, and excellence—guide how we build and support every deployment.
About the Role:
The Migration Support Engineer (MES) is a hybrid role that blends frontline L1/L1.5 cloud support with hands-on VM migration troubleshooting. You will own the ticket queue and triage customer-reported issues across OpenStack and Kubernetes environments at scale, while developing into a go-to resource for diagnosing migration and workload-mobility failures. You’ll work alongside senior engineers on critical production incidents, learning to separate symptom from root cause and control-plane behavior from real backend execution. This is an ideal role for someone who enjoys customer-facing troubleshooting and wants to specialize in migration and workload mobility.
You’ll work on:
- Critical production incidents (Sev1 / Sev2)
- VM migrations and workload mobility issues
- OpenStack and Kubernetes environments at scale
- Automation and operational improvements
Responsibilities:
The Migration Support Engineer will be involved in various aspects of the Customer Support SRE function, including:
- Support & Triage: Monitoring the ticket queue and owning L1/L1.5 triage of customer-reported issues across Platform9’s cloud platform, working with senior team members to drive root cause analysis.
- Incident Response: Responding to critical production incidents (Sev1/Sev2)—gathering diagnostics, scoping customer impact, and escalating with clear, reproducible context.
- Migration & Workload Mobility Troubleshooting: Investigating and resolving VM migration failures, including live migration timeouts, volume detach/attach inconsistencies, and Nova/API polling failures with delayed state transitions.
- Migration Analysis: Distinguishing control plane vs. data plane issues and API latency vs. actual backend execution success when diagnosing migration behavior.
- Migration Validation: Validating pre-migration readiness by analyzing resource availability, network dependencies and consistency, and control-plane responsiveness vs. backend execution.
- vJailbreak & Edge Cases: Supporting complex scenarios such as “vJailbreak” migrations and edge-case workload transitions.
- Monitoring & Alerting: Helping configure and fine-tune monitoring and alerting systems to proactively detect migration and platform issues before they impact customers.
- Automation: Contributing to automation tools and scripts that streamline migration validation, diagnostics, and recurring operational and support workflows.
- Documentation: Creating and maintaining runbooks, knowledge base articles, and migration playbooks that capture failure signatures and resolutions.
Work Distribution:
- Live Migrations + Monitoring ticket queue and troubleshooting customer issues, including migration failures (50%)
- Migration validation, readiness checks, and workload-mobility deep-dives (vJailbreak, edge cases) (15%)
- Talking through issues via Zoom (5-7%)
- Maintaining Knowledge Base / migration runbooks (10%)
- Training (1-on-1, personal study, support trainings/handovers) (10%)
- Meetings (5-7%)
- Projects (Automation, Reporting, Process Development) (5%)
Qualifications – Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Customer-facing support / handling experience.
- Administration experience in Linux and knowledge of storage and networking subsystems.
- Basic knowledge of OpenStack technologies (Nova, Cinder, Neutron/OVS, RabbitMQ, MySQL, network namespaces, hypervisors).
- Working experience with Kubernetes, including cluster operations, deployments, and troubleshooting.
- Familiarity with at least one scripting language (e.g., Python, Bash, Go).
- Exposure to VM migration or workload mobility concepts (live migration, storage detach/attach, state reconciliation).
- Strong problem-solving and analytical skills, with the ability to reason about distributed systems and control-plane vs. data-plane behavior.
- Team player with a strong sense of ownership and a passion for working in a data-driven organization.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
Preferred Skills
- Hands-on exposure to VM migration and DR scenarios, including migration tooling.
- Experience with Ceph and OVN/OVS.
- Familiarity with public cloud platforms (AWS / Azure / GCP).
- Kubernetes certification (CKA / CKAD) is a plus.
- Experience with monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana).
- Incident management experience (Sev1/Sev2).
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