LINUX/UNIX Systems Engineer (Senior Level)

Overview

This senior technical position will involve working in a team environment with a group of Systems Engineers designing technical architectures and implementing complex customer environments. Involving frequent collaborative efforts with engineers from both the Windows and network engineering disciplines, this position will implement a variety of customer environments across multiple data centers throughout the Northeast and Midwest United States. The position will also include regular communication to the Operations Support Center (“OSC”) in multiple geographic regions.

The successful candidate will have a strong technical acumen with a deep knowledge of the fundamentals of the LINUX and optimally other UNIX-based, operating systems. 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.

Technical responsibilities for the position will include building and administering 200 UNIX servers, involving multiple LINUX distributions and UNIX variants including Redhat, Centos, Debian, Solaris and HP-UX. These environments will be either in a customer shared or dedicated arrangement, on either physical or virtual (VMware) platforms. Additional experience that will benefit the candidate will include, but is not limited to, VMware, Cisco IOS, Juniper ScreenOS and EMC CLARiiON & Equallogic PS Series SAN platforms.

Minimal Travel Requirement - 10% or less.

Primary Functions

• Provide technical oversight and administration for over 250 UNIX servers.
• Technical activities including hardware/OS/application implementation, upgrades and support.
• Review and recommend server & software for corporate and customer applications.
• Design of complex technical architectures.
• Field, review and resolve customer troubles as escalated by Expedient’s OSC..
• Provide system performance and tuning as well as root cause determination in the event of failures.
• Produce and present documentation, training and standard operating procedures for both internal and customer use.
• Participate in engineering on-call, approximately 1 week per month.

Qualifications

Required

• 5 to 7+ years UNIX systems administration (Linux required)
• Experience configuring/administering SMTP, HTTP, DNS, RADIUS, FTP, and SNMP
• Experience scripting with shell/Perl
• Strong understanding of Internet/IP related technologies including, but not limited to, DNS, SMTP, HTTP/S, IP subnetting.
• Experience with Fiberchannel/iSCSI/SAS storage arrays. Understanding of concepts such as RAID.
• Have a working knowledge of networking technologies such as TCP/UDP port requirements, 802.1Q network tagging and routing.
• Ability to prioritize and be productive in high-pressure situations, providing timely status updates to customers, the OSC, and/or project management.
• Outstanding trouble-shooting ability. Ability to identify and resolve problems in “down” situations.
• 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 iptables and firewalling
• Strong organizational, communication, and interpersonal skills
• Ability to clearly document implemented solutions
• Experience working in a 24 x 7 environment
• Security focused mindset for builds and administration

Preferred

• 1-2+ years VMware ESX Enterprise administration, in a fully redundant environment utilizing SAN storage.
• B.S. in a technical discipline
• SAN environment experience
• EMC Networker experience
• IBM Tivoli (formerly Micromuse) Netcool experience
• Windows administration experience
• C/C++ or Java experience

Questions You Should Know

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 on a phone screen. If you find yourself unable to answer a more than one or two questions without assistance (i.e. Google or the like), then it’s likely you will not pass the phone screen. Answers to these questions should not be submitted with your resume; this is simply to help guide you in understanding 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 port does 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.
• Name 3 LINUX/UNIX based file systems. Compare and contrast.
• What’s sysV boot sequence? Describe in detail how it works.
• What’s YUM?

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

EOE/AA

This position requires you to be authorized to work in the United States.