Storage Rack Infrastructure Automation & Cluster Bring-Up - Hive Program

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Hive is a swarm of hundreds of identical storage nodes (Marvell/XSight DPU + SSD), each running a full Ceph plane: OSD, Monitor (MON), Manager (MGR), MDS, plus SeaStore and the NFS front end. Standing up, re-configuring, and recovering a cluster of this size by hand does not scale. We need an engineer who owns the automated hardware discovery and Ceph role-assignment pipeline: the flow that inventories every node and its hardware, decides which daemons each node should run, and drives the cluster from bare metal to a serving state. The flow must run fully autonomously by default, with a clean manual-override path for lab, bring-up, and failure-injection scenarios.

This is a specialized automation and lab-hardware-discovery discipline that the Hive team does not currently have dedicated ownership for. It is directly on the critical path for every test cluster, every silicon bring-up, and every customer-shaped deployment.

What you'll own

• Automated hardware discovery. Detect nodes as they power on and enumerate their hardware (DPU/SoC model, SSD media, DRAM, RNIC/network ports, BMC) using out-of-band and in-band inventory (BMC/Redfish/IPMI, PXE/DHCP boot, cloud-init/first-boot agents). Produce a single authoritative machine inventory that the rest of the pipeline consumes.
• Role assignment and cluster composition. Given the discovered inventory, decide and apply which Ceph roles each node runs — OSD, MON, MGR, MDS (and the NFS gateway) — encoded as declarative placement specifications. Own MON quorum sizing and placement, MGR redundancy, MDS/gateway placement, and CRUSH map / failure-domain layout so data and metadata land correctly across the swarm.
• Bare-metal → serving bring-up. Drive the end-to-end sequence: node provisioning, OS/image deploy, cluster bootstrap, daemon deployment via the Ceph orchestrator (cephadm-style), ceph-volume-style OSD provisioning on the SSD media, and health convergence to HEALTH_OK.
• Autonomous and manual modes. Make the default path zero-touch (a rack powers on and self-assembles into a healthy cluster), while exposing deterministic manual controls to pin roles, hold a node out, force a specific topology, or reproduce a customer/lab configuration for testing.
• Lifecycle and recovery automation. Node add/remove, drain and rebalance, daemon replacement, MON re-quorum after loss, MDS/OSD failover validation, and re-discovery after re-imaging — integrated with Hive's Fast Recovery + BMC work.
• Reconciliation and drift control. Continuously compare declared desired state against observed cluster state and converge — the same idea Ceph's orchestrator applies to service specs — with clear reporting when reality diverges from intent.
• CI/lab integration. Wire the pipeline into automated test so any commit can spin up a correctly-composed multi-node cluster on real hardware and tear it down cleanly.

Core (must-have):

• Deep experience in lab hardware discovery, inventory, and automated provisioning at fleet scale.
• Bare-metal automation: PXE/DHCP boot, BMC out-of-band management (Redfish/IPMI), image/OS deployment, cloud-init/first-boot.
• Infrastructure-as-code and config automation (e.g., Ansible/Terraform-class tooling) with a declarative, reconcile-to-desired-state mindset.
• Strong scripting/automation (Python and shell) and CI systems (Jenkins/GitLab CI or equivalent).
• Comfort designing systems that are autonomous by default with reliable manual override.

Strongly preferred (or ramp-up expected):

• Ceph operational knowledge: OSD/MON/MGR/MDS roles, the orchestrator/cephadm model, placement specs, ceph-volume, CRUSH maps and failure domains, MON quorum, and cluster health/lifecycle.
• Distributed-systems fluency: quorum/Paxos intuition, rebalance/recovery behavior, failure-domain reasoning.
• Networking bring-up for storage fabrics (RoCEv2/Ethernet, port discovery).
• Familiarity with DPU/SoC-based nodes and constrained-node environments.

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