Senior Virtualization Engineer - Nutanix / Proxmox

Senior Virtualization Engineer - Nutanix / Proxmox

Sutherland is looking for a Senior Virtualization Engineer where you have deep hands-on expertise in Proxmox VE and Nutanix (AOS/AHV), and strong VMware knowledge, to lead platform assessment and migration of VMware workloads to Nutanix and/or Proxmox. You will own day-to-day platform engineering tasks across assessment, migration planning & execution, and Day-2 operational stabilization, working closely with a cross-functional team of infrastructure, network, security, and application owners.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead technical assessment of current VMware estate (inventory, dependencies, criticality, constraints) and define target architecture for Proxmox and/or Nutanix.
• Define success criteria, test plans and validation steps across compute, storage, network, backup/DR, monitoring, and security.
• Build and configure lab/PoC environments (clusters, storage, networking, management tooling) and document findings and recommendations with risks and trade-offs.
• Design migration waves, cutover approaches, validation steps, and rollback plans; coordinate change approvals and maintenance windows.
• Execute workload migrations from VMware to Nutanix AHV and/or Proxmox (VM conversion, network/storage mapping, guest OS readiness, post-migration verification).
• Troubleshoot migration issues across hypervisor, storage, network, and guest OS layers; drive problem resolution to closure.
• Establish operational runbooks and standards: patch/upgrade process, backups, DR tests, monitoring/alerting, capacity/performance management, and incident response.
• Ensure high availability and resiliency configuration (cluster HA, live migration, storage redundancy); perform failover and recovery drills.
• Produce documentation and deliver knowledge transfer to internal teams (admin guides, SOPs, architecture diagrams).
• Automate provisioning and configuration where feasible (Ansible/IaC; scripting) and standardize templates for VM builds.
• Integrate with enterprise services (directory services, DNS/DHCP, NTP, PKI) and align security hardening requirements.
• Work with application owners to plan migrations, validate functionality and performance, and minimize downtime.
• Communicate progress, risks, and decisions clearly to stakeholders; contribute to project status and technical documentation.
• Work as part of a global team and capability to travel globally (up to 5% of the time) to support engineering activities.

Experience & Skills

• Proven hands-on administration of Proxmox VE in production: clustering, HA, KVM/QEMU, LXC, storage (Ceph and/or ZFS), networking (bridges, VLANs, bonding), upgrades and troubleshooting.
• Proven hands-on administration of Nutanix: AOS, AHV, Prism (Element/Central), cluster deployment/expansion, storage/container concepts, networking and security constructs, LCM upgrades, and troubleshooting.
• Strong VMware vSphere background (ESXi/vCenter) and experience migrating workloads from VMware to alternative hypervisors.
• Strong Linux administration (Debian/Ubuntu and/or RHEL-based), shell scripting, and automation mindset (Ansible; Terraform/PowerShell beneficial).
• Backup/restore and DR concepts; experience integrating platforms with enterprise backup tooling (e.g., Veeam).
• Solid understanding of datacenter networking and storage fundamentals (DNS/DHCP/NTP, TCP/IP, firewalls, iSCSI/NFS, multipath).
• Strong documentation, troubleshooting and stakeholder communication skills; able to work independently in a contractor capacity.

Good-to-Have

• Nutanix ecosystem components such as NCM/Calm, Flow/Flow Security, and/or NC2 (Nutanix Clusters in the Cloud).
• Monitoring/observability tooling (Dynatrace or similar).
• Security hardening experience for Linux-based hypervisors (e.g., STIG-aligned practices).
• Experience with enterprise-scale migrations and regulated environments.

Qualifications

• Bachelors / Masters degree in Computer Science or Information Technology.
• Excellent verbal, analytical and problem solving skills.
• Strong ownership and accountability mindset
• Ability to thrive in globally distributed environment
• Pune, India Location to collaborate with global stakeholders; ensure effective overlap with EU/India/US time zones as needed.

Additional Information

• Should be open to travel to Pune for the in-person interview round
• Willing to work in a hybrid model from the Pune office