Engineers who can put together and maintain 2PB of storage don't exist on the job market? I'd say you don't know the right people or aren't looking in the right places.

2PB is really not that much stuff these days. It's less than two cabinets of equipment and that amount of space (80RU or so) includes routers, switches, AC power distribution, OOB, etc.

They exist but finding and recruiting those people costs a non trivial amount of time and money. Both of which could be spent on whatever secret sauce your company does.

The thing is, the bar for managing a rack or two of off the shelf hardware is maybe an inch higher than the bar for managing just one server. Is it super hard to find someone that can handle physical servers at all?