[Discuss] [Position-available] Senior Sysadmin Wanted

[Dan Ritter]

What we're looking for:

A senior UNIX systems generalist, for IT and Ops. Some might say
DevOps. Some might say Site Reliability Engineer. We think of ourselves as
"sysadmins".


Who we are:

Smartleaf primarily develops and provides financial portfolio analysis,
delivered over the web to banks and brokerages.

Founded in 1999, Smartleaf is profitable, small in numbers and privately
held. Our offices are a short walk from the Kendall Square T stop,
in a sunny, top-floor office. In addition to competitive compensation,
Smartleaf employees receive comprehensive health and dental coverage,
three weeks paid time off, flexible work hours, ISOs, free food and an
espresso machine better than most coffee houses’ (almost like it’s
1999). There’s parking below us, a bike rack and a shower. Dress is
casual. See http://smartleaf.com, of course.

We are expanding the IT/Operations team from three to four. All of
us are generalists, with specialty skills that we teach to the others.
Everyone in the company is clever and interesting. Yes, really. Education
is important to us, but formal degrees are not. Autodidacts are extremely
welcome.


What we do:

This team handles everything that could possibly fall under the
IT/Operations umbrella in a small company. In IT, it's quite routine:
Desktop machines (mostly Macs), Samba for printing and file service,
Asterisk for phones. That's a fairly small part of our job, though.

On the operations side, we keep the company delivering the service
our customers are paying for. Linux servers (mostly Debian, a few Red
Hat-ish Oracle servers) at two colo data centers run our software.
Customers upload data via SFTP, we run lengthy analyses on that, and
then make it all available via a web interface. If it's mission critical,
we manage it ourselves, from DNS through load balancing to web servers,
databases and storage. We've been committed to reducing workload via
automated configuration management for a long time -- so long, in fact,
that we wrote our own deployment system and GPL'd it. We use a ticketing
system that's mostly for our own benefit.

The system runs 24/7, but we generally go home shortly after the market
closes. We have an available maintenance window for most of every
weekend, which we use for significant hardware changes and maintenance.
Every night is a fresh re-deployment. The monitoring system is in charge
of waking one of us up, if need be. Long term, we need to wake up about
once a month.

We make sure that everyone can telecommute; it beats going in on a
snow day.


What we think you are like: (one of us)

You're a senior UNIX sysadmin who likes command lines. You are very
willing to learn new things, often by teaching yourself. You also
like to share that knowledge with others, by teaching and by writing
good documentation.  You're comfortable in Perl and shell, though they
probably aren't your favorites. Talking to vendors, customers and other
employees doesn't bother you. There's a sense of accomplishment that comes
from finding a good solution to a problem, and fixing it so that we never
have to think about it again. Security is a set of tradeoffs, and you need
to pick what's most important to you because you can't have everything.

You are clever, competent, and kind.


Skill keywords:

Debian Linux, Red Hat Linux. Configuration management. Ruby, Rails,
C++, Perl, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Postfix, Apache, qmail, svn, git, mon,
Jira, Confluence. Request Tracker. JunOS, IOS, iptables, packet filters,
ldirector, ipvs, IPsec.  SNMP, SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, TLS, SSH.


Requirements:

- 10 or more years of UNIX systems administration
- experience with configuration management systems
- comfort with writing Perl and shell scripts for monitoring and
  automation
- full understanding of networks from wires up through
  application protocols
- solid organizational skills and time management, detail
  oriented
- excellent written English
- legal right to work in USA


Please send cover letters and resumes to future at smartleaf.com in plain
text or PDF. In your cover letter, tell us about an interesting technical
problem that you have solved, in a way which makes us excited to learn
more about you. If you ask questions, we will answer.