Infrastructure Engineer - Nutanix Subject Matter Expert
Summary
Senior infrastructure engineer acting as the go-to subject matter expert for a Nutanix hyperconverged platform: designing, building, upgrading and troubleshooting Nutanix clusters (AOS, AHV, Prism) in production, leading VMware-to-AHV migrations, DR design, and automating day-2 operations. Contractual role in India with on-call escalation duty.
Infrastructure Engineer Nutanix Subject Matter Expert
Role summary
We are hiring a senior Infrastructure Engineer to be the subject matter expert (SME) for our Nutanix hyperconverged platform. You will own the design, build, operation and lifecycle of Nutanix clusters running business-critical workloads, and be the go-to escalation point for the platform across compute, storage, networking and data protection.
This role sits on the Infrastructure team and works closely with Network, Security, Backup, Database and Application teams. It suits an engineer who has run Nutanix in production at scale and understands the surrounding data center stack well enough to troubleshoot end to end.
Role : Consultant/Contractual
Experience
7+ years infrastructure engineering, 3+ years hands-on Nutanix in production
On-call , Participates in rotation; primary escalation for Nutanix
Key responsibilities
Architecture and design
- Own the reference architecture for Nutanix clusters: node models, cluster sizing, replication factor, fault-domain (block/rack) awareness, and storage containers.
- Size new capacity with Nutanix Sizer and validate designs with X-Ray before production.
- Design multi-site and DR topologies, including metro availability, async/NearSync replication and runbooks.
- Define standards for VM templates, categories, networking, security policies and naming.
Build and lifecycle
- Deploy and expand clusters with Foundation; register and manage them in Prism Central.
- Run full-stack upgrades (AOS, AHV, firmware, Prism Central) through Life Cycle Manager (LCM) with zero or minimal downtime.
- Maintain hardware lifecycle with the OEM (Nutanix NX, Dell, HPE, Lenovo or Cisco) including RMAs and firmware compliance.
Operations and performance
- Be the L3 escalation for Nutanix incidents; open and drive cases with Nutanix Support.
- Monitor health, capacity and performance; run NCC health checks and act on findings.
- Troubleshoot latency and contention across the CVM, distributed storage fabric, hypervisor and physical network.
- Forecast capacity and present runway and spend to leadership.
Migration and modernization
- Lead migrations from VMware vSphere or legacy three-tier storage to AHV using Nutanix Move.
- Evaluate and roll out platform services such as Files, Objects, Volumes, NDB and NKP where they fit.
Automation, security and documentation
- Automate provisioning and day-2 tasks with Prism Central v4 APIs, PowerShell/Python, Ansible or Terraform, and Self-Service blueprints.
- Implement Flow microsegmentation, RBAC, encryption and STIG/CIS hardening; support audits and vulnerability remediation.
- Produce runbooks, as-built documents and knowledge transfer; mentor other engineers on the platform.
Required qualifications Nutanix platform
Candidates must show deep, hands-on production experience with the Nutanix Cloud Platform (current AOS 7.x releases), not just administration through the GUI. Candidates must be familiar with AOS distributed storage, AHV, Prism Element and Prism Central, Foundation and LCM, NCC and CLI, Data protection, Flow, Nutanix Cloud Manager, Nutanix Move, Support model. Candidates must also be familiar with Virtualization, Data center networking, Linux, Windows and identity, Storage and data, Backup and recovery, Unified storage, Databases, Containers, Hybrid cloud, End-user computing, Automation and IaC, Monitoring, Security and compliance, Hardware, ITSM and process.
Preferred qualifications and certifications
Nutanix Certified Professional, VMware VCP-DCV, CCNA / CCNP Data Center, or equivalent, Red Hat RHCSA, CKA, or HashiCorp Terraform Associate,
Other preferred experience:
- Ran 10+ node clusters, or several clusters across two or more sites, in production.
- Led at least one large VMware-to-AHV migration (hundreds of VMs) end to end.
- Built and tested a DR plan with documented RPO/RTO and successful failover tests.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, IT or equivalent experience.
What success looks like in the first year
Timeframe Outcome
30 days -Full inventory and health review of all clusters; NCC findings triaged
90 days -Documented standards and upgrade cadence; LCM upgrades current across all clusters
6 months -Automated VM provisioning; DR plan tested with RPO/RTO met
12 months -Migration or expansion roadmap delivered; second engineer trained as backup SME