THAT’S LOVELY… BUT WHAT’S THE JOB?

The primary responsibility of this job is architecting, administering, and fixing a couple hundred web, database, and application servers. We are looking for someone who lives and breathes systems administration and has advanced, expert level Linux experience at the command line, in a real production environment. You will also participate in platform architecture decisions and be a key player on the hosting operations team. Please read on for more specifics…

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Daily server operations (e.g., Log file analysis, performance tuning, alert responding, security reviews, user management, content distribution network configuration, content migrations, etc.)
• Backup process monitoring
• Database maintenance (e.g., Reindexing, query optimization, backup dumps)
• Platform performance monitoring
• Manage creation and configuration of new virtual machines
• Identifying tasks for automation and writing BASH and Puppet scripts around them
• Ad hoc BASH shell scripting
• Troubleshooting our applications (Usually involves analysis of Nginx logs, rewrite logs, error logs, basic PHP debugging, and occasionally packet capturing)
• Network monitoring system configuration and management
• Architecting new platform builds
• New technology research

SKILLS

• 3-5 years experience with distributed Linux administration, configuration/deployment and troubleshooting of Linux servers, common web servers and database technologies. If you don’t have 5 years of experience, but blow us away with your skills, we’ll consider you.
• Expert level operational understanding of a majority of the following technologies:
  • Linux
  • Nginx
  • PHP-FPM
  • MySQL and replication
  • BASH shell scripting
  • DNS
  • SMTP
  • Iptables
  • Fundamentals of IPv4 routing
  • Architecture. You should be able to:
    • Rapidly design and deploy multi-tiered web app architectures
    • Define security policies around data handling
    • Leverage various virtualization technologies for rapid deployment
    • Performance tune both operating systems and applications
    • Ability to self-manage and multitask in a fast paced environment. Things change often at Jellyvision, and it’s imperative that you’re able to juggle multiple tasks, track changes, AND maintain attention to detail.

NICE TO HAVES…

• Understanding of Amazon Web Services, specifically: EC-2, EBS, S3, SQS, Cloudfront, Cloudwatch, etc
• MongoDB architecture and operations
• Firm understanding of network monitoring/management systems
• Working knowledge of Puppet
• Functional knowledge of local and global application load balancing
• Understanding of tcpdump and protocol analysis
• Basic understanding of LDAP
• Knowledge of other programming languages (e.g., Java, Python, Ruby)

YOU SHOULD ALSO……

• Be a life-long learner
• Be disciplined…in your engineering
• Be imaginative…in your engineering
• Understand urgency, and when to apply it
• Write clear, easy to understand documentation

• Be able to read through and understand code for troubleshooting purposes
• Have a willingness to calmly own and resolve unexpected incidents that occur in a hosting environment

• Be a great communicator; written, verbal, Skype, video conferencing, smoke signals, sideways glances

ANYTHING ELSE?

Yes.  We only hire nice, bright, funny people who are willing to work hard.  Jellyvision is a group effort and our Account types must be capable of working collaboratively with creative, technical, and external client types.  Everyone at Jellyvision shares a commitment to excellence and a desire to work in a comfortable, friendly atmosphere.

ARE THERE ANY PERKS?

Yes, we love perks.

• Competitive pay, stock options and benefits. 401(k) with matching. And we pay 100% of the cost of premiums for medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance for our employees (as long as you qualify for our tobacco-free discount; if you’re a tobacco user, your medical premiums will be higher than $0). We also cover a really nice chunk of the cost of premiums for spouse/partner/dependent medical, dental and vision insurance.
• Casual dress and a flexible schedule.  Come in a sweatshirt, jeans, whatever, like everyone else here.
• Creative work environment. We are lucky to work in a place that is full of intelligent, talented and innovative folks. Although most hours the place is deathly quiet (we’re a focused bunch), this is punctuated with hilarious outbursts and general merriment, which makes a nice way to spend the day.
• Free food. Every week, we stock our kitchen with free healthy snack foods, and we have a “hot lunch” catered once a week to give people a reason to hang out and eat together.
• Easy transportation. We’re really close to the ‘L’ and the Halsted (#8) bus (right by the Apple Store and Mega Whole Foods too), and we have a transit FSA that allows you to dedicate pre-tax dollars to public transportation expenses. And a number of our employees like to bike to work, so we also have showers and lockers in the office.
• Did we mention our yoga class?  We bring a pro instructor right to the office.  Fully subsidized by Jellyvision and fully optional, btw.
• Oh! And we have a massage chair. Not just any massage chair, my friend.  It’s the HumanTouch HT 5320 WholeBody™ Massage Chair. Feeling a little stiff? Sit down. Relax. Feel better? Good. Okay, back to work.

INTERESTED? Great, we look forward to reading your application – make sure it includes:

• A cover letter that highlights three reasons you think you’d be great for the gig, focusing on how your past work experience has prepared you for this kind of position – or why you think you can rock the job even though you don’t have past work experience that’s perfectly aligned. Writing is key to all that we do, and we weigh cover letters heavily.
• Your resume.

You will receive an auto-reply confirming that we’ve received your application.

If you decide to apply, please know that every complete application will be carefully reviewed. Seriously! We know it is a time commitment to prepare an application. And we respect that effort by thoughtfully reviewing every complete application and responding one way or the other. But that kind of thoughtful review means that it sometimes takes us awhile to get back to applicants, so please NO PHONE CALLS. The time we spend responding to phone calls and emails inquiring about where we are in the process is time that we could be spending actually moving the process along – so please be patient with us!