Senior NAS Infrastructure Specialist

🏗 We're Hiring: Senior NAS Infrastructure Specialist

📍 Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)

🕒 Employment Type: Full-Time

💼 Experience Level: Mid-Level to Senior

🌐 Work Arrangement: Fully Remote

About Us

We are a construction-focused organization committed to delivering complex projects through operational excellence, technology-driven collaboration, robust infrastructure management, and effective information governance. Our distributed teams work across Project Management, Construction, Engineering, Procurement, Commercial, Legal, Finance, Human Resources, Design, Quality, HSE, Consultants, Contractors, Suppliers, Logistics, Administration, Information Technology, and Executive Leadership to ensure reliable access to business-critical information and support uninterrupted project delivery.

We recognize that secure, scalable, and highly available data storage is essential to our operations. Through effective infrastructure management, proactive monitoring, capacity planning, disaster recovery preparedness, and continuous improvement, we aim to maintain dependable technology services that support collaboration, protect corporate information, and strengthen business resilience.

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior NAS Infrastructure Specialist to design, implement, administer, optimize, and maintain Network Attached Storage (NAS) infrastructure across enterprise IT environments. The successful candidate will have strong expertise in enterprise file storage, network storage protocols, storage capacity management, performance optimization, data protection, high availability, and storage infrastructure security.

This role will be responsible for ensuring reliable file-based storage services for business applications, engineering documentation, construction project records, design files, technical drawings, financial documents, collaboration platforms, and other critical organizational data. The Senior NAS Infrastructure Specialist will collaborate with Infrastructure, Network, Cybersecurity, Cloud, Applications, Database, Backup, Engineering, Project Management, and business teams to maintain resilient storage services, resolve complex technical issues, support infrastructure modernization, and align storage operations with organizational requirements and applicable United Arab Emirates regulations.

Key Responsibilities1. NAS Infrastructure Administration and Operations

• Administer, configure, monitor, and maintain enterprise NAS platforms across production, development, testing, and disaster recovery environments.
• Manage NAS appliances, storage clusters, file servers, storage controllers, and associated management interfaces.
• Maintain the availability, stability, performance, and operational integrity of file-based storage services.
• Perform routine health checks, system diagnostics, configuration reviews, and preventive maintenance.
• Monitor storage system alerts, hardware status, service availability, and infrastructure dependencies.
• Manage NAS configuration changes in accordance with approved change management procedures.
• Maintain accurate inventories of storage systems, hardware components, software versions, licenses, support contracts, and infrastructure dependencies.
• Coordinate with infrastructure vendors and service providers to resolve hardware faults, software defects, and platform-related incidents.
• Support the deployment, configuration, upgrade, and retirement of NAS systems throughout their operational lifecycle.

2. Storage Architecture and Solution Design

• Design and maintain scalable, resilient, and secure NAS architectures aligned with enterprise infrastructure requirements.
• Evaluate storage capacity, performance, availability, connectivity, and redundancy requirements for new and existing workloads.
• Develop storage solutions that support large file volumes, shared departmental data, engineering applications, and project collaboration environments.
• Assess workload characteristics, including file sizes, access frequency, concurrency, throughput, latency, and growth projections.
• Recommend appropriate NAS configurations, storage tiers, disk technologies, cache settings, and network connectivity options.
• Support the selection and implementation of enterprise NAS solutions based on operational requirements, technical suitability, and total cost of ownership.
• Develop architecture documentation, storage design specifications, configuration standards, and implementation plans.
• Identify opportunities to consolidate storage platforms, simplify infrastructure management, and improve resource utilization.
• Participate in infrastructure architecture reviews, technology assessments, and long-term storage strategy planning.

3. File Storage Protocols and Connectivity

• Configure, administer, and troubleshoot file access protocols, including Server Message Block (SMB/CIFS) and Network File System (NFS).
• Support appropriate NFS versions and SMB features according to platform capabilities and organizational requirements.
• Manage file sharing, export policies, share permissions, protocol settings, and client connectivity.
• Troubleshoot file access failures, authentication issues, protocol negotiation problems, name resolution dependencies, and network-related storage incidents.
• Collaborate with Network and Systems teams to optimize connectivity between NAS platforms, user endpoints, application servers, and virtualized environments.
• Review network throughput, packet loss, latency, and other connectivity factors affecting file storage performance.
• Support multipathing, redundant network interfaces, link aggregation, and resilient connectivity where supported by the storage platform.
• Validate storage access compatibility across Windows, Linux, virtualization platforms, and approved enterprise applications.
• Maintain consistent protocol configurations and interoperability standards across supported environments.

4. Capacity Planning and Storage Optimization

• Monitor storage consumption, utilization trends, available capacity, and projected growth across NAS environments.
• Develop capacity forecasts using historical consumption, planned construction projects, business expansion, and application requirements.
• Identify capacity constraints before they affect service availability or business operations.
• Recommend storage expansion, data lifecycle improvements, archival strategies, and capacity optimization measures.
• Configure and manage quotas, capacity thresholds, reservations, and allocation policies where supported.
• Review storage utilization at the volume, aggregate, share, directory, or other applicable levels.
• Identify duplicate, obsolete, inactive, or unnecessarily retained data in collaboration with authorized data owners.
• Support storage tiering, compression, deduplication, and other efficiency features where available and appropriate.
• Prepare regular capacity reports and recommend cost-effective infrastructure improvements.
• Ensure sufficient storage headroom for operational demand, maintenance activities, data recovery, and expected workload growth.

5. Performance Monitoring and Troubleshooting

• Monitor NAS performance indicators, including throughput, input/output operations per second, latency, CPU utilization, memory consumption, cache efficiency, and disk performance.
• Establish performance baselines and identify deviations that could affect user experience or application availability.
• Investigate slow file access, high latency, resource contention, degraded throughput, and intermittent connectivity.
• Analyze storage workloads to identify bottlenecks involving controllers, disks, network paths, protocol settings, or client behavior.
• Use approved monitoring dashboards, performance analytics, diagnostic utilities, and vendor tools to investigate complex incidents.
• Recommend and implement performance tuning measures based on verified findings and platform capabilities.
• Coordinate with application, database, network, and virtualization teams to resolve end-to-end performance issues.
• Conduct performance validation following storage expansions, firmware upgrades, configuration changes, and infrastructure migrations.
• Document root causes, corrective actions, performance improvements, and preventive recommendations.
• Maintain operational thresholds and alerting rules to enable early detection of storage degradation.

6. Data Protection, Snapshots, and Replication

• Configure and manage NAS snapshots, snapshot schedules, retention policies, and recovery procedures where supported.
• Implement file replication and storage synchronization solutions to support data availability and recovery requirements.
• Maintain appropriate replication schedules, consistency checks, monitoring, and alerting.
• Monitor replication lag, failed transfers, synchronization errors, and destination capacity.
• Validate snapshot integrity and confirm that recovery points meet approved recovery objectives.
• Support file-level, directory-level, share-level, and volume-level recovery activities.
• Coordinate with Backup and Disaster Recovery teams to align NAS protection mechanisms with enterprise backup policies.
• Distinguish between snapshots, replication, and independent backups to ensure appropriate protection against accidental deletion, corruption, ransomware, and infrastructure failure.
• Review data protection configurations against business criticality, recovery time objectives (RTOs), and recovery point objectives (RPOs).
• Maintain documented recovery procedures and participate in periodic data restoration exercises.