Action Verb is looking to hire a full-time UNIX System Administrator (DevOps Engineer) to take charge of maintaining the servers and network that we use to deliver our excellent software-as-a-service and hosting products.
This is a full-time, work-from-home, choose-your-own-hours position.
[NO RECRUITERS, NO PHONE CALLS, PLEASE.]
Action Verb's Story
Action Verb is a bootstrapped, profitable company founded in 2007. Action Verb offers two main products: BrickFTP, a hosted file sharing service for business, and Vae Platform, a unique web hosting platform with an integrated SaaS CMS system. Our SaaS services have several hundred paying customers and a total userbase of about 7,000 users. On the hosting side, we host about 500 domains.
We're a small company (you'll be the 4th person on the team when you join) but we're at an inflection point where we're trying to ! grow into a more robust team.
Our hosting environment is almost entirely operated on Amazon EC2, though we have a few external dedicated servers for things like offsite backup and access to cheaper bandwidth for asset serving. Currently, we run 3 Amazon RDS instances, about 15 EC2 instances, and about 4 off-Amazon servers.
Here's where you come in.
Up until now, Kevin, the founder of the company has been handling all server administration personally. Although the demands aren't that high, and our systems are largely stable, we'd like to have someone around who can focus on the servers and give them the attention they deserve.
You'll be responsible for:
- Keeping our servers up-to-date and patched with the latest security updates
- Responding to the needs of our developers and creating new servers as necessary
- Performance tuning
- Ensuring t! hat we have proper backups and redundancy
- Busine! ss-continuity planning and ensuring that we can recover from failure as quickly as possible
- PCI Compliance on the servers that require it
- Monitoring our servers using a monitoring framework (we currently use monit and Wormly)
We'd also be looking to you to help us out with new initiatives that we're looking to roll out on the DevOps side:
- Roll out Chef as a management tool for our servers
- Centralize syslogging
- Improve our backup and redundancy procedures
- Work with the developers to identify bottlenecks and improve performance
Our Stack
If you're going to work for us, you'd better like our stack. It's crazy that a lot of sysadmin ads don't post this stuff. Here's what we use:
- Linux - CentOS and Ubuntu
- Plesk for hosting servers
- Amazon EC2 and Amaz! on RDS
- Nginx
- Ruby
- PHP
- MySQL
- Postfix
- memcached
- Git
We're primarily a Ruby development shop now, so almost all our apps are developed in Ruby and deploying using Passenger. We do have some older apps that use PHP, though they're also deployed with Passenger. We try to keep our stack as standard as possible.
On-Call
We're looking for someone who can be on-call 24/7/365 to respond to server emergency events. While these are very rare (and we hope that you'll make them even more rare), it's important for us that we always have a sysadmin that's near a pager/phone/computer. This doesn't mean that you can't take vacations or ever go off the grid -- it just means that you need to sync up with Kevin so that he can be available during the times you aren't.
Because of the on-call d! emands of this job, we are very open to offering other perks to help of! fset that burden.
The way I think this will shake out is as follows: This is a full time job and we'll pay you a full time salary. However, I really don't think that the workload will fill a 40-hour week. So if it ends up that you end up only working 25-30 hour weeks, we're still happy to pay you full-time because you're on call. Additionally, this is a fully remote job and we encourage you to work from home.
To be honest, I'm not 100% sure how other businesses handle this, so let me leave it this way -- we're really open minded when it comes to how to make this work, so if you're willing to do it, we'll find a way to make both of us really happy.
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