[MA] job: principal database engineer

[topaz]

[also posted to suspects]

My employer, RNK Telecom located in Dedham, Massachusetts, is in search of a qualified database lead with a strong Java background. We have interviewed several candidates from headhunters and found them all lacking. (Shock!)

Here is the actual job description from http://www.rnktel.com/careeropportunities.html.

Principle Database Engineer

Responsible for the design and implementation of a new operations database. This database will contain all customer and operational data for the company and will undergo significant enhancement over time. Key components are information used for billing, customer records, sales order processing, current/historic network information as well as inventory and reordering information.

Skills and Requirements

• 7 - 10 years experience in the design, development, deployment and ongoing maintenance of significant databases implemented in one or more of the following: Oracle, MySql, Informix, or Postgres.
• 6 years hands-on Java experience.
• 2+ years J2EE experience along with a background in c and/or c++.
• Knowledge of IP and telephony network environments and technology is a strong plus.
• Ability to work independently and as a member of a team composed of people with a wide variety of skills.
• Experience with very large databases, as well as scale, performance and security issues.
• Strong comfort with Solaris and other Unix based systems.

Contact Jon Saperia at jon@rnktel.com. NO PHONE CALLS PLEASE

For your reference, the IT group at this company is a handful of geeks. Our systems are almost exclusively running FreeBSD and Red Hat with MySQL and the like; we might be persuaded that we need to run Oracle, but it's quite unlikely that a Solaris machine would ever see the light of day here. Feel free to drop me a line or give me a call if you need to hear more.

Jon is my manager; the person who gets this job will work in my group. There's no referral bonus here (as yet); my interest in seeing one of you in this position is limited to my desire to work with people who are not losers.

(Please do not flame me for the technical requirements for the job or the use of the word "Principle." Not my choice, folks.)

--twp

Comments

[fj.livejournal.com]

What do you think about this list of requirements?

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

OK, good question.

I think that the numbers are a little extreme, and my guess is that Jon would still look at someone who had less than 7 years experience designing big databases and less than 6 years of Java experience, if they appear to have had solid work in the trenches.

I think a background in C/C++ is fairly optional. If we find someone who has worked in those languages it'll be really helpful, since all of our existing code is written in C. But the person in this position is unlikely to spend a lot of time digging through C code in depth -- they will be implementing stuff from scratch more than integrating with existing code.

Knowledge of telephony and IP networking is indeed very useful though not critical. I'm still struggling to keep up with the telco engineering issues that we deal with. :-)

[fj.livejournal.com]

I keep rewriting the same text over and over, but it comes down to this: I am not surprised you are not finding the people. What these reqs communicate is that you want a JAVA early adopter with experience in the hottest, constantly changing, and highly specialised field of JAVA that commands at 3 years experience +$100K, but you actually want this person's main focus to have been something else. For around a decade. With auxilliary languages and knowledge. Tim, I know hundreds of IT people and I can't think of one that would fit this bill. They're either coders or database deployers -- not both. Not with that many years of specialization.

[tfarrell.livejournal.com]

I agree. That job is two different people rolled into one, and I rarely see good Java coders who are any good at database design, or vice versa. I don't think I've ever even met a person who would fit that job description.

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

I always thought a 'principle database' was one designed around mathematically principled models, such as a relational algebra.