Engineer or Senior Engineer -- Internal IT Department Position Description (Spring 2023)

About us

Sine Nomine Associates provides IT systems engineering and consulting services, enterprise-grade commercial support for open-source systems software, and products and services for the Linux on mainframe platform. Our distributed team provides engineering services to large financial, engineering, manufacturing, and government organizations.

We are seeking an Engineer or Senior Engineer to join our dedicated team.

Position Type

Part-time salaried employee. Flexible hours (as negotiated), nominal 20 hrs/week. Some overtime and off-hours work is required by the need to manage servers outside business hours and to work with others in different time zones. This is an exempt salaried position, but compensatory time off may be offered when overtime exceeds what is customary in system administration.

Responsibilities

This position initially focuses on system administration of our internal IT environment, which consists primarily of over 200 virtual machines (mostly Linux) in a VMware vSphere environment deployed in a single rack at a collocation facility. Numerous tactical and strategic projects are in play as we evolve our applications and infrastructure.

Responsibility and commensurate authority will ramp up rapidly as the new team member demonstrates his/her capabilities, moving from task-oriented work toward strategic IT projects. We are a small company, so there will always be a share of the routine work (such as applying updates to servers). The mix of work will change significantly over time, however, adding more tactical and strategic projects.

The eventual goal is for the new engineer to move from a full-time IT responsibility toward a mix of internal IT and customer-facing consulting engagements in SNA’s lines of business. These include enterprise Linux and open source support on Intel and System z platforms, logical and physical design of network operation centers (NOCs), ITSM assessment and consultation, OpenAFS programming and support, systems programming, and three dimensional visualization technology.

Work Location and Travel

The engineer would telecommute most of the time, except when onsite work is required at the data center or at a customer site. An office space can be made available at the data center, located in the Hills and Dale vicinity of the northwest side of Canton, Ohio. It is desirable to live within 30 minutes of the data center.

Initially, minimal travel outside northeast Ohio, except for one week per year for the mandatory company meeting. Over time, the job is expected to evolve to include customer-facing consulting work, which would require additional travel to customer sites in the United States and internationally.

Qualifications

Technical

General Linux installation, configuration, and administration (any Linux distribution)
Proficiency in bash shell, SSH, and GNU/Linux command line utilities (text utilities, rsync, screen, tmux, etc.)
Proficiency in one or more scripting languages (Python, Perl, etc.)
Understanding of IPv4 networking concepts including addressing, routing, and Linux diagnostic commands (such as tracepath and ping)
Knowledge (at a functional level) of common Internet protocols such as SMTP, HTTP, FTP, SSH, IMAP4, LDAP, and similar
Experience with at least one virtual machine environment (vSphere, HyperV, Virtual Box, KVM, etc.)

Interpersonal

Excellent written communication skills
Ability to learn, fueled by curiosity, and appetite for working independently on complex problems
Mastery in defining a tactical plan, identifying tasks and deliverables, and executing to plan (on time, on quality, and on budget)
Close cooperation with supervisor, engineering teams, and CEO

Education

Bachelor of Science (or equivalent) in IT-related field such as Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or similar. Equivalent certification and/or professional or military experience will be considered as an alternative to a formal degree.

Desired

Proficiency in administering and/or programming MySQL, MariaDB,
PostgreSQL, Db2, Oracle, MSSQL, or other SQL databases
Deployment and/or administrative experience in common applications on a Linux stack, such as ERP, mail transport and delivery, instant messaging, document management, and collaboration platforms
Experience in a web development role using a content manager such as Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, or similar
Ability to create and edit HTML and CSS for web pages
Proficiency with source revision control systems (git preferred)
Experience in monitor tools such as Nagios, OpenNMS, Tivoli, or similar
Experience with ticketing tools such as Request Tracker (RT) or similar
Conceptual knowledge of ITSM guidelines such as ITIL
Experience with ITSM tools from IBM/Tivoli, BMC, HP, CA, etc.
Knowledge and experience with IBM System z mainframe computers
Knowledge of IP-based telephone and video conferencing systems

Company Benefits

Flexible vacation and paid holidays
Remote work

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