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.