topaz

If you've been reading me here long enough, or hang out with me with any regularity, you have probably heard an earful about my job. You probably know that I find it frustrating, and at times maddening -- that we seem always to be in the middle of a crisis, that my co-workers don't know how to work well with others, that the company has no notion of product development.

So now that you know all of that, I need to convince you why you should come work with me.

Yes! We're hiring!

agaran has officially been approved to hire another senior Unix system administrator, because there's just too goddamn much for one person to do. They need another me.

I don't have a formal job description, but the goal is to hire someone who's roughly at my level. That means: "several" years of Unix system administration, with an emphasis on Red Hat Linux and FreeBSD. You'll need to be comfortable with workhorses like sendmail, BIND, Apache, MySQL, Postgres, and be able to troubleshoot at least basic problems with them. A solid knowledge of TCP/IP, BGP, and wrangling Cisco routers would be a big, big plus. Windows support skills are also a big plus. Basic programming skills would also be useful though not essential.

The company's headquarters are in Dedham, MA, but most of the equipment is in a switch office in Bedford; you will probably be spending most of your time in Dedham.

A bit of background. The company is privately held and very profitable, but it is also relatively small and the founders are trying hard to grow it. The hardware infrastructure has grown up like a creeping vine over the years, to the point that no one can remember where the spit ends and where the baling wire begins. Our job is to tease this mess apart and make it orderly, maintainable and scalable. It's a gigantic job, but it's also an exciting one: we are in the position of defining formal operational procedures for the company for the first time in its history.

That means that we are likely to give strong preference to someone who is: flexible enough to work under rapidly changing conditions; very good at communicating with their colleagues; comfortable working with bizarrely configured systems even while putting together a plan to replace them; organizational skills that allow you to figure out how to make sense of this mess.

Pluses to working here:

Building a rocking infrastructure for a company that desperately needs it
Very decent pay (this is not a sweat equity joint), with a profit-sharing policy
Financially stable company
qwrrty, catya and agaran
Right down the street from Lambert's in Westwood.
Two-minute walk from the Dedham Corporate Center MBTA commuter rail stop