LINUX/UNIX Systems Engineer

Overview

This full-time position will involve working in a team environment with a group of Systems Engineers involving frequent collaborative efforts with engineers from both the Network engineering & the Network Operations Center (“NOC”)  departments to support a variety of customer environments across multiple data centers throughout the Northeast and Midwest United States. The position will also include regular communication and support responsibilities to both the NOC and customers in multiple geographic regions.

The successful candidate will have a strong technical acumen with strong knowledge of the fundamentals of the UNIX/LINUX operating systems. In addition, the candidate should have a thorough knowledge of scripting and PERL. The successful candidate must also posses strong communication skills and be able to communicate to both internal and external users as well as customers on a variety of levels. A strong desire to learn and expand on existing knowledge is a requirement. Industry standard certifications are also a plus.

This position reports to the Systems Manager and is based in either Pittsburgh, PA or Cleveland, OH.  There is a minimal travel requirement – 5% or less.

Primary Functions:

• Provide technical oversight and administration for over 150 UNIX servers
• Work as part of a team to design, develop, and implement new solutions for both internal and external customers
• Field, review, and resolve day-to-day system problems
• Provide day-to-day maintenance of systems
• Make system change recommendations to management based on customer requests and analysis
• Perform and implement system changes or coordinate changes with vendor or other designated resources
• Complete larger scale project work such as system consolidation/centralization
• Provide automation by means of shell or perl scripting
• Be on-call one week per month

• Participate in engineering on-call, approximately 1 week per month.

Required Qualifications:  The candidate for this job must possess the following skills:

• 4 to 8+ years UNIX systems administration (LINUX required)
• Experience configuring/administering SMTP, HTTP, DNS, RADIUS, FTP, and SNMP
• Experience scripting with shell/Perl
• Experience with at least one of MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle
• Experience with at least one of Postfix, Sendmail, or Exim
• Experience with at least one of Apache, Tomcat, or lighttpd
• Experience with RAID and/or LVM
• Experience with iptables and firewalling
• Strong organizational, communication, and interpersonal skills
• Outstanding troubleshooting/problem solving abilities
• Experience working in a 24 x 7 environment
• Security focused mindset for builds and administration
• Preferred Qualifications:  The candidate for this job would ideally possess the following skills, but these skills are not required:
• B.S. in a technical discipline
• SAN environment experience
• EMC Networker experience
• Micromuse Netcool experience
• Windows administration experience
• C/C++ or Java experience

Questions you should know the answers to:  To give you, the potential candidate, an understanding of the technical acumen required by the position, we’ve put together some sample questions that would be asked in a telephone interview.  If you find yourself unable to answer more than one or two questions in each category without assistance (i.e. Google or the like), then it’s unlikely you will pass the telephone screen. Answers to these questions should not be submitted with your resume; this is simply to help guide you in understanding our technical expertise requirements.

• Define (3) levels of RAID; if parity is involved describe how the parity rests on the disks.
• True or False: An SSL website requires a dedicated IP address. Why?
• What ports do SMTP, HTTP, and DNS run on?
• How many IPs (approximately) are in a Class B network?
• Name 3 processor models (mainline CPUs – e.g. manufactured by Intel, AMD, SUN, IBM) which were produced in the last 4 years. Compare/contrast 2.
• What is SUDO?
• How do you determine how much SWAP is in a system?
• What goes in /usr/local?
• What does the command ‘sed s/[.]txt/[.]RTF/ < /dev/zero > /dev/null’ do?
• Compare the different run levels: 0,3,5,6
• How does one update the library path on a LINUX system?

Expedient is an Equal Opportunity Employer, promoting a drug-free workplace.
This position requires you to be authorized to work in the United States.

Please submit a copy of your resume and cover letter to sys-resumes@expedient.com