Expert Cassandra SME / Production Stabilisation Specialist

Project overview

Mission Context

As part of the stabilization of a business-critical Apache Cassandra environment, we are looking for a senior expert capable of intervening hands-on alongside the existing operational team.

The mission aims to:

Main Missions

Detailed Activities

Profile Sought

Required Technical Skills:

Appreciated Skills:

Soft Skills:

Work Environment

• Stabilize strategic Cassandra production.
• Investigate and resolve recurring P1 incidents.
• Perform root cause analyses (RCA).
• Tune the Cassandra and JVM platform.
• Implement concrete remediation measures.
• Improve monitoring and operational practices.
• Transfer knowledge to the existing support team.
• Administer and optimize Apache Cassandra clusters in production.
• Investigate critical P1 incidents and lead their resolution.
• Perform root cause analyses and propose remediation plans.
• Implement necessary configuration corrections and optimizations.
• Perform Cassandra tuning: performance, read/write, compaction, replication, consistency, etc.
• Diagnose and resolve JVM / Java heap / memory / garbage collection issues.
• Optimize cluster topology: nodes, racks, datacenters, data distribution.
• Optimize storage and capacity: disks, usage, growth, distribution.
• Improve monitoring, alerts, and operational runbooks.
• Collaborate closely with the existing ops/support team.
• Document incidents, root causes, and remediations.
• Ensure knowledge transfer to the support team.
• Diagnosis and troubleshooting of Cassandra clusters in production.
• Analysis of logs, metrics, traces, and abnormal behaviors.
• Review of Cassandra and JVM configuration.
• Identification of bottlenecks: CPU, memory, I/O, network, GC, compaction, tombstones, etc.
• Participation in capacity and topology reviews.
• Setup or optimization of dashboards and alerts.
• Writing operational recommendations and documentation.
• Supporting internal teams in incident resolution.
• Participation in crisis committees and post-mortems.
• 6 to 10 years of specific experience with Apache Cassandra, including significant production experience.
• Proven experience in Cassandra administration, architecture, tuning, and troubleshooting.
• Confirmed experience in P1 incident management and root-cause analysis.
• Experience in critical / high-availability environments.
• Very good command of Apache Cassandra architecture.
• Cassandra cluster administration: nodes, racks, datacenters, replication.
• Cassandra performance tuning.
• JVM troubleshooting: heap, garbage collection, memory.
• Topology, storage, and capacity optimization.
• Monitoring and operational improvement.
• Knowledge of Linux environments and distributed systems.
• Ability to intervene directly in production.
• Experience with very large Cassandra clusters (thresholds to be specified according to client context).
• Cloud or hybrid environment (AWS, GCP, Azure), if applicable.
• Proficiency in observability tools: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, etc.
• Major Cassandra migrations / upgrades: version updates, topology changes, on-prem/cloud.
• Automation / IaC: Ansible, Terraform, Kubernetes, operational scripts.
• High autonomy and sense of responsibility.
• Ability to work under pressure on critical incidents.
• Excellent communication with technical and business teams.
• Pedagogical skills and ability to document and transmit knowledge.
• Pragmatic, problem-solving oriented approach.

Project details

• Start: ASAP
• Duration: 6 mois renouvelable
• Remote: remote
• Location: Île-de-France, France, FR
• Rate: 50-69 EUR/h
• Languages: French