About the role
You will own the compute, storage, virtualisation and backup layers on projects and managed accounts across central and southern Iraq. That covers hyper-converged and traditional three-tier builds, storage sizing, hypervisor design, and the backup and disaster recovery platforms that sit behind them.
A large share of the work is migration: moving clients off ageing physical estates or out of rooms that have run out of power and cooling, without unplanned downtime. If you enjoy planning a cutover in detail and then executing it calmly at three in the morning, this is the role.
You will be based in our Baghdad office, reporting to the Head of Infrastructure in Erbil, with travel to client sites and occasional work in Basra.
What you will do
- Size compute and storage from measured workload data rather than from a vendor configurator.
- Design and build virtualisation platforms on VMware vSphere and vSAN, Nutanix, Hyper-V or Proxmox.
- Implement backup and disaster recovery to the three copies, two media, one off-site, one immutable, zero errors principle, on Veeam, Commvault or Acronis.
- Plan and run P2V and V2V migrations with tested rollback at every step.
- Run quarterly restore drills with clients and produce the report that proves the result.
- Build and harden Windows Server and Linux estates, including Active Directory and certificate services.
- Produce the handover documentation: as-builts, runbooks, capacity baselines.
- Provide third-line escalation for the managed services team.
What we are looking for
- Four or more years building and running production virtualisation and storage.
- VCP-DCV or equivalent, with real depth in at least one hypervisor platform.
- Backup platform experience where you have actually performed restores under pressure, not only configured jobs.
- SAN and NAS fundamentals: protocols, multipathing, snapshots, replication, and how to size for IOPS rather than only capacity.
- Strong Windows Server and Active Directory skills, plus competent Linux administration.
- PowerShell scripting for repeatable work.
- A methodical approach to change: written plans, rollback steps, and evidence.
- Working English plus Arabic. Kurdish (Sorani) is a bonus.
Nice to have
- VCAP, NCP, VMCE or storage vendor certification from Dell EMC, HPE or NetApp.
- Azure or AWS experience, particularly hybrid identity and site recovery.
- Container platform exposure: Docker, Kubernetes.
- Data center facility awareness: power budgets, cooling and rack planning.
- Experience in banking or healthcare, where change windows are tight and audited.
What we offer
- Sponsored certification with exam fees, official training and study time in working hours.
- Lab access with real kit, where every project is staged and tested before it goes to a client site.
- Rostered and compensated out-of-hours work, with time back after night cutovers.
- A published competency framework for the systems track.
- Health cover for you and your dependants, transport allowance, project bonuses and 22 days of leave.
- Relocation support and residency paperwork if you are moving to Baghdad.
One thing we will ask. Tell us about a migration that did not go to plan. What the plan said, what actually happened, and what you changed in your method afterwards. We are far more interested in that than in a list of platforms.
How to apply
Send your CV to careers@oktagate.com with the subject line "Application: Systems Engineer". A short migration or design document you have written is worth including if you have one you can share.
OKTAGATE hires on ability. We welcome applications regardless of gender, background or religion, and we will make reasonable adjustments to our process on request.