Sr. VAST Storage Administrator

We are seeking an experienced Storage Administrator to manage, monitor, and optimize our VAST Data storage platform . The ideal candidate will own the day-to-day health of the VAST clusters, support enterprise data services (NFS, SMB, S3, and block), and partner with infrastructure, backup, security, and application teams to ensure high availability, performance, and data protection across the environment.

This role needs working hours aligned to UK business hours . There may be occasional out-of-hours work, with time off in lieu.

 

Key Responsibilities

- Administer and monitor the health, capacity, and performance of the VAST storage cluster

- Provision and manage Views, Quotas, Tenants, and protocol access for business units and applications

- Plan and execute non-disruptive upgrades, patches, and hardware expansions

- Own backup, snapshot, and replication schedules; test and validate disaster recovery readiness

- Troubleshoot performance and connectivity issues across compute, network, and storage layers

- Maintain accurate system documentation, runbooks, and change records

- Partner with security teams to enforce access controls, encryption, and compliance requirements

- Engage VAST support/TAM for escalations, RCA, and platform roadmap planning

 

Required Skills Experience

 

VAST Data Platform Expertise

- 8-10+ years strong hands-on experience with the VAST Data Platform.

- Hands-on administration of VAST Data clusters, including the Disaggregated Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture, CBoxes/CNodes (compute), and DBoxes/DNodes (storage enclosures)

- Proficiency with the VAST Management System (VMS) for cluster configuration, monitoring, and lifecycle management

- Experience creating and managing Views, View Policies, Quotas, and Tenants for multi-protocol data access

- Configuration and troubleshooting of NFS (v3/v4), SMB/CIFS, S3, and native VAST DataBase/DataEngine protocols

- Working knowledge of VASTs Similarity-based Data Reduction, Global Namespace, and QLC flash-based storage design

- Experience with VAST Protected Views, Snapshots, and native async/sync Replication for DR and business continuity

- Familiarity with VAST Element Store, Catalog, and Insight Engine for metadata search and analytics workloads

- Understanding of non-disruptive upgrades (NDU), firmware/software patching, and rolling maintenance on VAST clusters

 

Infrastructure Networking

- Solid grasp of high-speed networking fabrics: RDMA/RoCE, InfiniBand, and 100/200/400GbE Ethernet

- Experience with NVIDIA/Mellanox switches and NIC configuration in NVMe-oF storage environments

- Working knowledge of NVMe-oF, NVMe/TCP, and shared-everything flash storage principles

- Ability to diagnose network-attached storage performance issues (latency, throughput, packet loss)

- Experience integrating storage with Linux/Windows hosts, hypervisors (VMware/KVM), and container platforms (Kubernetes, CSI drivers)

 

Core Storage Administration

- 3+ years administering enterprise NAS/SAN or scale-out storage platforms (VAST, Isilon, NetApp, Pure, PowerScale, etc.)

- Capacity planning, performance tuning, and proactive monitoring of storage utilization and growth trends

- Backup, snapshot, and disaster recovery process design, execution, and testing

- Storage security: RBAC, encryption at rest/in transit, Active Directory/LDAP integration, and audit logging

- Incident response, root-cause analysis, and vendor (VAST support/TAM) escalation management

- Change management and documentation practices for a regulated or enterprise IT environment

 

Scripting, Automation Monitoring

- Proficiency with VASTs REST API and/or Python SDK for automation and reporting

- Scripting experience in Python, Bash, or PowerShell for operational automation

- Experience with monitoring/observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, or VASTs built-in telemetry)

- Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools (Ansible, Terraform) is a plus

 

Soft Skills

- Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills under production pressure

- Clear written and verbal communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

- Ability to work cross-functionally with network, virtualization, database, and security teams

- Comfortable participating in an on-call rotation and after-hours maintenance windows

 

Preferred Qualifications

- VAST Data certification (e.g., VAST Certified Administrator) or completion of VAST Academy training

- Experience migrating workloads from legacy NAS/SAN platforms to VAST

- Exposure to AI/ML and GPU-based data pipelines (e.g., NVIDIA DGX, GPUDirect Storage)

- Industry certifications: CompTIA Storage+, RHCE, VMware VCP, or equivalent.

- Bachelor s degree in computer science, IT, or related field, or equivalent hands-on experience