Lead Storage Engineer

Overview

The role owns the design, implementation, and day-to-day administration of enterprise storage platforms that underpin OSS/BSS systems, network element data, video/media content, and core IT workloads, ensuring high availability, performance, and data protection across a large-scale telecom environment.

Responsibilities

• Administer, monitor, and maintain SAN, NAS, and object storage platforms supporting production, DR, and non-production environments across the Claro VTR estate.
• Design and implement storage provisioning, zoning, LUN masking, replication, and tiering strategies aligned with capacity and performance requirements.
• Plan and execute storage capacity forecasting and growth planning in coordination with network, virtualization, and application teams.
• Lead storage migrations, firmware/microcode upgrades, and platform refresh activities with minimal service disruption.
• Own backup and disaster recovery operations, including backup job design, retention policy management, restore testing, and DR failover/failback drills.
• Monitor storage health, performance, and capacity using enterprise monitoring tools; proactively identify and remediate bottlenecks, hot spots, and failure risks.
• Manage incidents, problems, and change requests related to storage infrastructure in line with ITIL processes and client SLAs.
• Collaborate with security and compliance teams to enforce data-at-rest encryption, access controls, and audit requirements (e.g., ISO 27001, telecom regulatory standards).
• Support integration of storage systems with virtualization platforms (VMware/Hyper-V), Linux/Windows hosts, and, where applicable, cloud storage services.
• Develop automation scripts/runbooks (Python, PowerShell, Ansible) to streamline routine storage operations, reporting, and health checks.
• Maintain accurate documentation: architecture diagrams, SOPs, runbooks, and asset/configuration records (CMDB).
• Participate in vendor management — coordinating with OEMs (e.g., NetApp, Dell EMC, HPE, Pure Storage) for support cases, RCAs, and hardware lifecycle management.
• Provide L2/L3 support and act as an escalation point for storage-related incidents, including participation in an on-call rotation.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience in enterprise storage administration and engineering, preferably in telecom or large-scale service-provider environments.
• Strong working knowledge of SAN technologies (Fibre Channel, FCoE, iSCSI) and NAS protocols (NFS, CIFS/SMB).
• Hands-on experience with major storage platforms such as NetApp (ONTAP), Dell EMC (Unity, PowerMax, PowerStore, Isilon/PowerScale), HPE (Nimble, 3PAR/Primera), Pure Storage, or equivalent.
• Experience with backup and recovery solutions such as Veritas NetBackup, Commvault, Veeam, or Dell EMC Networker/Avamar.
• Solid understanding of storage networking components — SAN switches/fabrics (Brocade, Cisco MDS), zoning, and multipathing.
• Experience with storage performance monitoring and capacity management tools (e.g., vendor-native tools, SolarWinds, Grafana/Prometheus, ScienceLogic).
• Familiarity with virtualization platforms (VMware vSphere, Hyper-V) and their integration with shared storage.
• Working knowledge of Linux and Windows Server host-side storage configuration (multipathing, LVM, file systems).
• Understanding of data replication and DR technologies (synchronous/asynchronous replication, snapshots, storage-based DR orchestration).
• Exposure to scripting/automation (Python, PowerShell, Bash, or Ansible) for operational efficiency.
• Working knowledge of ITIL processes (incident, change, problem, and capacity management) and ITSM tools (ServiceNow or equivalent).
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and root-cause-analysis skills for complex, multi-vendor storage environments.
• Good communication skills in English; Spanish language proficiency is an added advantage given the Chile-based client environment.