Senior Systems Administrator

National Public Radio is a privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization that serves as a national syndicator to a network of 900 public radio stations in the United States.

We are looking for a talented and knowledgeable Linux System Administrator with DevOps experience: someone skilled in and passionate about Linux, server, network and storage infrastructure as well as automation. We are looking for a person who learns fast and can figure things out independently—can show us a better way of managing, monitoring and continuously deploying complex systems to the web.

We run a highly reliable and scalable Linux-based private infrastructure with a virtualized fleet of servers deployed to multiple geo-locations. We are passionate users of and contributors to the open-source software. Current application stack includes: Java, PHP and Node.js software talking to MySQL and ElasticSearch, as well as: various document databases and key/value stores.

Senior Systems Administrator is primarily responsible for managing, monitoring and automating operations of a high-availability, high-scalability server infrastructure, performing in-depth performance tuning, as well as hardware troubleshooting and maintenance when necessary.

• Must have 5-7 years relevant work experience
• Fluency in Linux system administration (preferably in Debian/Ubuntu)
• Fluency in Linux scripting: shell scripting, lightweight PHP and/or Perl scripting.
• Fluency in administering Apache and/or Nginx web-servers
• Extensive experience administering Linux in a virtualization environment.
• MySQL administration and troubleshooting experience
• Experience with clustered file system technologies such as Isilon, Gluster, etc
• Experience with TCP/IP networking technologies (routing, switching, Cisco, Brocade, F5, etc)
• Experience with content delivery networks such as Akamai and Limelight.
• Experience with cloud technologies such as AWS, Rackspace, Openstack, etc
• Solid track record of deploying and scaling redundant infrastructure
• Experience with document databases (preferably MongoDB)

• Experience working with at least one of:

  • Chef
  • Puppet
  • SaltStack
  • Jenkins CI
  • Capistrano
• Proven ability to write clear, concise documentation
• Cares greatly about automation and has little tolerance for repetitive manual work
• Ability and willingness to travel to and from hosting facilities in the Boston region (primarily Somerville), occasionally transporting servers

Bonus Points for:

• Experience working with a version control system (SVN or Git preferred).
• Experience with monitoring tools such as Nagios, Zabbix, Cacti, etc.
• Advanced scripting/programming chops.
• “Addiction” to building fault-tolerant, highly reliable systems.

What we are looking for:

• Creativity, initiative and acute attention to detail
• Thirst for innovation and “thinking outside the box”.
• Vigor for automating everything repetitive.
• Obsession with software scalability and performance under high loads.
• Love for using and contributing to open-source software.
• Honesty, friendly attitude and good sense of humor.