Victoria Metrics Architect

Job Title:Victoria Metrics Architect

Location :Bellevue, WA / Overland Park, KS

Contract

Required Qualifications:

VictoriaMetrics — Expert Level

• Candidates should have hands-on Victoria Metrics production experience at scale for this role.
• Significant production experience operating VictoriaMetrics at scale — VMCluster deployments handling sustained, high-cardinality workloads in live environments. This is the non-negotiable baseline for the role.
• VMCluster internals at depth: the write path from VMInsert through VMStorage replication, the query fan-out and merge behavior of VMSelect, and the performance implications of topology decisions on ingestion throughput and query latency.
• Active time series lifecycle management: how time series are created, sustained, and expired; the relationship between cardinality and memory pressure; and the ability to diagnose and remediate a cardinality explosion in a production environment.
• MetricsQL fluency: advanced aggregation, rollup window semantics, subquery patterns, and query design that reduces load on VMStorage at scale.
• VMAgent at depth: scrape configuration, stream aggregation for edge-side cardinality reduction, rate limiting, deduplication, and write buffering continuity during upstream unavailability.
• VMAuth multi-tenancy: per-tenant routing via VMUser custom resources, token-based authentication, and read/write path segregation.
• VMAlert and VMAnomaly: alerting and recording rule design, anomaly model selection, and integration with enterprise alert dispatch systems.
• Federation design: global query layer architecture, cross-cluster deduplication, and remote_write performance tuning under high-cardinality ingestion at sustained scale.
• Storage architecture: retention modelling, down sampling, backup and restore, and capacity planning for time-series workloads.
• VictoriaMetrics Operator: lifecycle management of all VM custom resource definitions and upgrade strategy on OpenShift.

Red Hat OpenShift — Production Depth

• Substantial Kubernetes experience with a material portion on Red Hat OpenShift in bare-metal or on-premises enterprise environments — not exclusively managed cloud Kubernetes.
• OpenShift security model: Security Context Constraints, Network Policy, namespace RBAC, and the constraints that apply to stateful, high-throughput workloads.
• StatefulSet lifecycle, PersistentVolumeClaim management, and StorageClass selection for write-intensive time-series workloads.
• OCP upgrade path management and the implications for Operator compatibility and cluster monitoring interactions.
• Multi-cluster OpenShift topology: hub and spoke architectures, cross-cluster networking, and remote scrape or remote_write connectivity across cluster boundaries.
• Comfort designing for IPv6 and dual-stack network environments — increasingly common in carrier-grade infrastructure deployments.

GitOps and CI/CD Delivery

• GitOps-native delivery as a professional standard: all platform configuration managed in Git, no manual changes to production cluster state, and a clear promotion gate model from lab through to production.
• ArgoCD at production scale: application hierarchy design, sync policy configuration, health checks for custom resources, and multi-cluster application deployment.
• Kustomize overlay strategy for multi-cluster and multi-tenant deployments — base definitions with environment-specific patches.
• GitLab CI/CD pipeline design: manifest validation, environment promotion gates, and automated operator upgrade pipelines.
• Terraform or equivalent infrastructure-as-code for provisioning supporting platform resources.

Security and Identity

• HashiCorp Vault at production depth: dynamic secrets, Vault Secrets Operator synchronisation, token lifecycle management, and PKI secrets engine integration for certificate issuance.
• Enterprise PKI: TLS certificate lifecycle, automated renewal, and CA distribution to distributed cluster workloads.
• OIDC and OAuth2 integration: platform service authentication via an enterprise identity provider, service account token federation, and the elimination of static credential patterns.
• Zero Trust design as a default: every interface between platform components authenticated and encrypted; no implicit trust between tenants, ingestion sources, or query consumers.

Telecommunications and Network Observability

• Proven experience designing or operating observability platforms for telecommunications infrastructure — 5G core, RAN, transport, or carrier-grade edge environments.
• FCAPS framework alignment: mapping Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance, and Security monitoring requirements to metric taxonomies, alerting rules, and operational dashboards.
• Heterogeneous vendor telemetry integration: Prometheus exporter compatibility assessment, OpenMetrics format validation, and labelling standardization across multi-vendor sources.
• Multi-vendor, multi-tenant metrics ingestion design: label isolation strategy, per-vendor cardinality allocation, and data segregation enforcement at the proxy and routing layer.
• Enterprise NOC integration: alert routing design from evaluation engine through to ticketing or event management platforms, deduplication, suppression, and severity mapping.