Meltwater Group: System Operations Engineer (m|f)

Location: San Francisco and Berlin
URL: http://meltwater.com/

We want to expand our Systems Operations team and are searching for two people to work from either San Francisco, CA or Berlin, Germany.

We - About the Meltwater Group

Meltwater was founded in Oslo, Norway in 2001 and is currently one of the fastest growing technology companies in the world. We have grown organically from a small start-up of 2 people to a multinational company on six continents. In the last five years, we have opened more than 50 offices around the world.

Our business divisions include:

• Meltwater News is the first choice service people subscribe to if online news monitoring is critical for their business.
• Meltwater Reach is one of the innovators within search engine marketing, offering an easy-to-use technology for pay per click analysis.
• Meltwater Press is software designed for PR professionals, helping you to focus your press release through the most efficient channels.
• Meltwater Buzz is a social media monitoring tool, allowing our customers to search insightful information from thousands of social media resources across the globe.

What - The Position

There are 500+ servers in several data centers around the world that provide 24/7 service to over 20,000 customers. The applications are usually written in Java, using Spring and Hibernate to access data in (sharded) MySQL. They run on tomcat or as standalone applications. We have significantly sized hadoop/HBases cluster and use different technologies (Katta, Solr, ElasticSearch) to distribute searches against lucene indices. This should give you a good idea of what the day-to-day challenges are.

In the last months, we've been busy:

• Troubleshooting Apache Katta,
• Hunting down tomcat webapp memory leaks,
• Automating dev environment setup with chef,
• Scripting releases with Capistrano,
• Testing and Benchmarking Redis, Riak, Membase,
• Working with dev teams to optimize MySQL queries,
• Developing internal applications to help with reporting incidents and provisioning machines,
• Replacing machines that reached end of lifecycle with the newest and greatest hardware,
• And of course the daily Sysadmin tasks like user management, scheduling routine maintenance, disk cleaning, etc.

Your working days will consist of an extremely variable combination of tasks; truly no day and the next are alike. Therefore, you need to exhibit a high degree of professionalism and multi-tasking capabilities, including working under pressure.  Don't forget, lots of enthusiasm! After some training time, typically six to eight weeks, you will take part in the on-call rotation. Currently, this means covering one week per month from Monday to Sunday.

Who - Your skills

• You know Linux and tools like sed, awk, grep etc. in and out,
• You are interested in both application development and systems engineering,
• You have strong communication skills and stay calm and focused even if production goes down. You understand the needs of product managers, developers and the applications themselves and can moderate to find the best solution for all parties, and
• You have good time management and can multitask, do small tasks while following through larger projects.

How - Getting it done!

• Expertise in Java and MySQL. "Expertise" means being able to explain Generational GC and discuss InnoDB vs. MyISAM from the top of your head,
• Strong knowledge of at least two of the following languages: PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, bash,
• Experience working with a (multi-node) production environment, and
• An eye for new technologies and an attitude that always asks "How can we do this even better?"

Please submit:

a Cover letter, your CV/Resume, and something you wrote: code, a blog post about technology, or your sendmail.cf to join.ops@meltwater.com. Interviews will be held in Berlin and San Francisco in February 2012.

To apply: Please submit: - Cover letter, - CV/Resume, - something you wrote: code, a blog post about technology, or your sendmail.cf to join.ops@meltwater.com. Interviews will be held in Berlin and San Francisco in February 2012.

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