Bare-Metal Provisioning Recovery Leader

The mandate

The operator runs provisioning profiles that apply firmware settings, storage layouts and fabric identities across edge-site server cohorts. Automated rebuilds and field-team coordination determine mobile-core capacity availability and hardware state. The role exists because the organisation requires strengthened bare-metal leadership and a declared recovery path independent of manual vendor utilities.

The interim must take the Johannesburg seat within three weeks and serve for fourteen months, with a possible two-month extension if radio or core launch dates move the final capacity exercise. A permanent platform search begins after three representative edge sites complete qualified fleet rollout, expected in month eight. The successor will overlap for six weeks and command the last site rebuild.

Handover requires every hardware cohort to have signed firmware, boot, storage, fabric and security profiles; provisioning and rollback to operate without undocumented vendor access; inventory state to reconcile physical and control records; three site-loss or rebuild drills to meet capacity windows; and the permanent leader to accept exceptions, spares, supplier defects and release authority.

The interim may stop fleet rollout, quarantine cohorts, set golden profiles, reject hardware evidence, sequence capacity releases, redirect internal staff and approve up to ZAR 260 million inside the recovery. Permanent hiring, new server architecture, core-software changes, long-term supplier replacement and decisions above ZAR 55 million require council approval. Security boot and network-certification controls cannot be waived.

Radio optimisation, subscriber-product design, public-cloud migration and field civil works are explicitly out of scope. The mandate owns bare-metal discovery and provisioning, firmware and configuration authority, hardware qualification, rollback, inventory truth, edge-site capacity release and the team operating those controls.

Why this seat is open

The failed rollout showed that automation could reproduce an invalid hardware state consistently across distant sites, and leadership departure removed the integrator across suppliers and platform teams. Delayed core capacity now affects regional launch commitments. A temporary executive must qualify one repeatable fleet path, exercise recovery without hidden tools and transfer permanent command before scale resumes.

What you will own

• Reconstruct profile generation, approval, provisioning, firmware, boot, storage, fabric, identity and inventory outcomes across affected cohorts.
• Establish authoritative hardware classes and signed golden profiles with compatibility, expiry, evidence and owner for every component.
• Decide cohort quarantine, rework, rollback, rebuild and release disposition using measured network-capacity consequence.
• Remove undocumented vendor utilities by integrating approved recovery functions or explicitly governing necessary break-glass access.
• Build qualification gates for supply provenance, firmware, secure boot, storage, fabric, performance, failure and field operability.
• Command drills involving control-plane loss, failed firmware, unavailable boot service, fabric mismatch, site rebuild and supplier access loss.
• Transfer profiles, fleet state, exceptions, defects, spares, test evidence and release rights through successor-led provisioning.

Candidate qualifications

• Held executive responsibility for large bare-metal fleets supporting telecom, edge cloud, hyperscale or similarly distributed infrastructure.
• Recovered automated provisioning that propagated unsafe firmware, boot, storage or network state across hardware cohorts.
• Designed signed golden profiles, compatibility gates and physical-to-control inventory reconciliation at fleet scale.
• Eliminated undocumented vendor recovery dependencies or bounded them through auditable break-glass controls.
• Qualified capacity releases across heterogeneous suppliers and remote sites using repeatable physical tests.
• Handed fleet provisioning authority to permanent leadership after witnessed rebuild and rollback exercises.