Designated Service Engineer - Ceph Expert

About this role

About the job

WEKA is architecting a new approach to the enterprise data stack built for the age of reasoning. NeuralMesh by WEKA sets the standard for agentic AI data infrastructure with a cloud and AI-native software solution that can be deployed anywhere. It transforms legacy data silos into data pipelines that dramatically increase GPU utilization and make AI model training and inference, machine learning, and other compute-intensive workloads run faster, work more efficiently, and consume less energy.

WEKA is a pre-IPO, growth-stage company on a hyper-growth trajectory. We’ve raised $375M in capital with dozens of world-class venture capital and strategic investors. We help the world’s largest and most innovative enterprises and research organizations, including 12 of the Fortune 50, achieve discoveries, insights, and business outcomes faster and more sustainably. We’re passionate about solving our customers’ most complex data challenges to accelerate intelligent innovation and business value. If you share our passion, we invite you to join us on this exciting journey.

What You’ll Be Doing

This is a customer-facing Premium Services role that combines deep, hands-on Ceph architecture and administration with the high-touch, outcome-driven approach of a Senior Designated Services Engineer (DSE). You will be the primary Ceph subject matter expert for assigned strategic customers and internal initiatives, owning the design, deployment, lifecycle operations, and performance of Ceph-based object storage environments. In parallel, you will play a key role in ensuring WEKA's Customer Success, contributing to our five-star Gartner reviews. You will work with cutting-edge technologies and top-tier customers, providing technical expertise and strengthening customer relationships.

Collaborating closely with Account Teams, you will gain deep insight into customers' business requirements, technical needs, and system environments. Your role involves resolving technical issues, bridging gaps between customers and Engineering, and ensuring the highest level of service.

Ceph Architecture & Operations

• Architect, deploy, and operate large-scale production Ceph clusters supporting S3 with an emphasis on availability, performance, and operational simplicity.

• Own cluster lifecycle activities: upgrades, patching, configuration management, routine health checks, and proactive risk remediation.

• Troubleshoot complex issues across the Ceph stack, lead incident response and root-cause analysis.

• Establish and maintain runbooks, operational best practices, and customer-facing documentation; drive continuous improvement in reliability, observability, and automation.

• Partner with customer teams on security and compliance requirements

• Advise on hardware and topology choices to meet workload requirements.

Designated Services Engineering

• Serve as the primary technical liaison between customers and WEKA Engineering/Product to address feature gaps, reliability concerns, and documentation improvements.

• Own, track, and document customer issues via the ticketing system; drive issues to resolution with clear, timely communication and executive-ready updates when needed.

• Proactively monitor customer environments (Ceph and WEKA) using observability and remote monitoring tools to identify and remediate risks before they impact production.

• Support account teams (Customer Success, Sales Engineering, Partners/Resellers) with deep technical expertise and credibility in front of senior customer stakeholders.

• Contribute to knowledge sharing through internal and customer-facing documentation (FAQs, KB articles, runbooks) and repeatable troubleshooting playbooks.

• Manage multiple engagements and cases concurrently, balancing urgency, impact, and long-term customer outcomes.

• Participate in on-call and follow-the-sun support rotations as required; work occasional alternative hours (nights/weekends/holidays) and travel as needed.

Learning & Growth at WEKA

• Ramp on WEKA’s architecture, tooling, and support model, and progressively take ownership of designated services engagements beyond Ceph.

• Develop deeper expertise in S3-compatible object storage concepts and ecosystems (clients, load balancing, performance testing, multi-tenancy), with mentorship from WEKA SMEs.

• Partner with internal teams to improve product supportability and operational excellence for object-storage use cases.

Requirements

We’re looking for a senior, customer-facing engineer who can lead Ceph architecture and operations today, and who is excited to grow into a broader object-storage and WEKA role.

• 10+ years in customer-facing technical roles solving complex enterprise infrastructure issues.

• 5+ years of hands-on Ceph experience in production: cluster design, deployment, upgrades, and day-2 operations.

• Strong understanding of Ceph internals and operational mechanics: MON quorum, MGR active/standby, OSD behavior, CRUSH and CRUSH maps, pools and placement groups (PGs), recovery/backfill and rebalancing.

• Experience operating large-scale (multi-PB) Ceph environments and navigating the operational challenges of fleet size, PG scaling, and long-running recovery events.

• Practical experience with Ceph RGW and S3 concepts (buckets, users/tenants, load balancing, scaling patterns, performance troubleshooting).

• Expertise in Linux/Unix administration in multi-platform, distributed environments.

• Strong troubleshooting skills across hardware, OS, networking, and distributed storage layers (including diagnosing performance bottlenecks and failure scenarios).

• Deep understanding of networking (Infiniband, Ethernet, DPDK, UCX), cloud computing, and distributed storage.

• Experience with observability and monitoring stacks (Prometheus/Grafana and common log/metrics tooling).

• Proficiency in Python and/or Bash; comfort building automation for monitoring, diagnostics, and repeatable operational tasks.

• Exce

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