Senior Systems Administrator � Linux

Senior Systems Administrator - Linux

The job

Strategic Data is looking for a Senior Systems Administrator - someone who can help our team of developers and systems admins build a great platform for doing the whole pile of different development things we do.

Our business is all about collecting data, processing it, reporting on it, and generally getting it from point A to point B in the right format and on time.

We have a decent start on building out a platform that makes it easy to quickly build space for new projects, but we need someone to come along and help drive the whole thing home: finish off the things we know we want, trial the things we think we want, and help us work out the things we don't even dream about yet.

Along the way we are building tools that let us scale up, out, and across: we have made it easy to get new systems up in minutes rather than hours, and we want to be able to do the same with our software projects. We also want to make it easy to get things right: fast, simple, and able to handle confidential data well enough we can easily pass government health data audits.

What we love are people who can see that something needs to be done, jump in and say "let me get that for you", and let the rest of us know that it will be sorted out - forever. We don't want to hold your hand over every little thing, or hold you back when you have a great idea and want to get it done.

We mostly use Debian Linux, and develop in Perl, along with a bit of Ruby in the sysadmin area, a touch of Java in some of our infrastructure, a smidgen of Erlang supporting services. We are frankly not religious about this, just "mostly a Perl shop" with extras.

If you were working for us over the last couple of months you would have:

Written a whole bunch of puppet code. We have about 16K lines of code in the repository, along with 6,700 of comments in our SVN repository at the moment. (With 500K lines of changes over the last three years.)
Investigated options for working with git as well as (or in place of) Subversion, to see if it can improve our developer throughput.
Worked with the developers to identify the best deployment strategy for new applications and how to meld that with our certification requirements.
Written a formal proposal to use non-EL2 certified firewalls, including the cost/benefit analysis and threat and risk assessment aspects, for the directors.
Talked to sysadmin staff and the directors about increasing team size to meet our performance goals, including training to help staff out.
Added some missing LDAP indexes to get rid of another annoying error email from the status monitoring system.
Looked at a Splunk enterprise license to see if it was worth buying, and to see how our initial trial was going.
Helped decommission a bunch of obsolete servers.
Started to design tools to manage multiple PostgreSQL clusters so we can hit our security requirements and still allow our developers superuser access when deploying their applications requires it. (Plus, wished that PSQL security rules were a tiny bit more flexible.)
Look to update our collective deployment to the latest release, and use a network-wide scheduler to manage load during puppet runs more smoothly.
Prototyped a light-weight Perl web application framework and database abstraction layer, then handed them on to developers to use.
Helped project-manage necessary upgrades to a set of servers for one of our clients.
Helped diagnose an NGINX / FastCGI / Perl Catalyst interaction that caused incorrect URL paths to be generated on output.
Written up this job description, to help find someone to take over from you.
Investigated distributed NoSQL solutions to provide highly available file storage and data storage support for some of our projects.
Improved the integration of our email spam filtering service.
Talked with the directors about future development tools and technologies.
Worked with upstream to integrate a patch solving a problem with one of our third party FOSS tools.
Investigated an RT38 performance problem.
Worked to bring Java application servers into our puppet management system.
Improved iSCSI storage server robustness for our KVM/OpenVZ virtualization systems.

The Team

The Systems Admin team includes: a full time Senior Systems Administrator, Sys Admin contractor support (~2 days a week), support from our IT Support business division of the business

The rest of the team includes a number of perl programmers, WebSurvey Technicians (who set up on-line surveys - see www.websurvey.com.au), project / account management staff and admin/ support staff.

A bit more about the company and the job.

Strategic Data has a relaxed work environment; despite the length of that list we have a pretty easy time of things, and as long as the job gets done we don't really mind how you schedule the time around it.

Our academic, as well as business, influences still show pretty strongly in The culture of the company, and we are looking to keep it that way.

We are absolutely committed to keeping your "work/life balance" (or, as we like to call it, "sanity") intact. We aim to maintain a 40 hour working week and, on the rare occasions people work more than this, the time is recognized. We have a time-in-lieu system to track this.

The company has a bonus system based on company performance.

Contact

Finally, we are absolutely happy to answer questions about the whole thing. If you want to talk to Daniel Pittman, who is currently doing this job, you can get him on +61 3 9340 9000, or at daniel@strategicdata.com.au or call Andrew Gordon (Director) on the same number of email andrew.gordon@strategicdata.com.au

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