We are looking for a candidate that is highly technical and passionate about their work. We are a small team working in the IT and Managed Services Provider / ISP space, although we are not your typical MSP as we offer a broad range of self-hosted cloud products to our customers and run all our own infrastructure across Australia so you will be able to work with a very broad set of technologies and quickly grow your levels of technical expertise.

We are looking for someone to join our engineering team to help solve complex technical problems and allow our business to grow in the face of increasing levels of automation. The ideal candidate should be extremely passionate about learning new technologies and skills, and self-driven, with an ability and desire to quickly pick up projects and run with them. The candidate should also be able to bring their prior technical experience and input into how to solve any problem and be able to work autonomously as well as part of our broader team. They should also be considered a technical all-rounder, with a high level of skill in several key areas, but with a willingness to apply their problem-solving skills to any new area or technology.

You have the opportunity to join a small growing company, allowing you to work with us on building and improving infrastructure that you may not get to touch at larger companies. You also will get to put a large degree of influence into the design of our infrastructure, where striving for scalability and availability is important.

Successful candidates ideally would be full-time/part-time in our Sydney-based office, however we are open to all applicants and remote working arrangements.

Key responsibilities

• Working within our engineering team on designated engineering projects to design, build and improve our infrastructure.

• Working as part of the engineering team to maintain all our existing infrastructure to a high level – including parts of our core network, critical Linux systems for services such as DNS, Mail, VOIP, RADIUS.

• Helping to maintain, redesign and grow our core network infrastructure across Australia.

• Work on our existing systems to design and build improved redundancy, increased scalability and automation.

• Your main focus will be on Linux-based systems for our internal infrastructure, though a majority of customer infrastructure is Windows based. Depending on your experience with Windows environments you may or may not be an escalation for customer infrastructure.

• You will be part of on-call rotation for responding to after-hours critical system monitoring alerts.

• You will be responding to escalated issues or critical system down issues with our infrastructure, customer infrastructure, and other core infrastructure.

• Working on scheduled after-hours projects for new infrastructure, upgrades and issues, as required.

• Scheduled inter-state visits are required at times for projects and datacentre maintenance of the core infrastructure.

• Working in our datacentre locations as needed for performing regular maintenance tasks, including preparing for and rolling out infrastructure upgrades or fixes, as well as racking and cabling equipment.

• You must be able to take full ownership of an issue and see it through to completion, as well as have a desire to continually look for ways of improving how things are done.

• In some cases, you may be working directly with customers for pre-sales engineering and solution design for major projects, as needed.

• Working with our Level 2 technicians to identify recurring and large impact issues the support team is facing and put forward solutions we can implement to address the root cause.

• Working with our Level 1 and 2 technicians to perform scheduled training and up-skilling for the support team, as needed.

Required Skills

Successful candidates typically hold or have held an existing senior position with 5+ years’ experience in many or all of the required skills below:

• Experience with Linux system administration, supporting and building Linux-based infrastructure, or experience with technologies listed in this document.

• Experience acting in a senior technical role or as an escalation point.

• Strong understanding of network routing and switching fundamentals, and some experience with Cisco or Juniper network equipment, with an ability to troubleshoot underlying network issues relating to the systems you are working on. Our goal is for engineers to be able to troubleshoot systems from all angles.

• Experience with managing virtualisation environments such as VMWare or KVM.

• Experience with data centre environments and physical server hardware such as RAID, racking, Dell Open Manage, iDrac etc.

• Programming/scripting ability with languages such as Python, Golang or PowerShell or equivalent. For the purposes of building automation scripts or building our infrastructure.

• Experience managing and configuring web server software such as Apache, Nginx and load balancers such as HA Proxy.

• Some understanding of BGP and OSPF, with an ability to troubleshoot networking issues.

• Some experience designing systems for high-availability, using load balancers, file replication, database replication.

• Experience working with VPN software such as OpenSwan, or understanding of VPN technologies such as IPSec, or L2TP.

• Understanding of NBN, ADSL, Fibre technologies and required infrastructure such as DHCP, RADIUS, L2TP/LNS. Working with carriers for troubleshooting complex end user faults.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills. Ability to work with a small team on projects, and develop and work within timelines for project delivery.

• Familiarity with monitoring tools such as Nagios, LibreNMS.

• Self-driven, with strong analytical and problem-solving skills.

Desired Skills

These are skills that you may not have and are not required, but anyone who also has some of these skills are most likely to standout and be successful. You should expect that over time you would get training and exposure to these areas when working with us, and there is an expectation that you would develop skills in these areas over time.

• Experience with centralised logging and data analysis with tools such as ELK, Grafana.

• Experience with VOIP. PBXes such as Asterisk or FreeSwitch. And SIP Proxies such as Kamailio or OpenSER.

• Experience with Automation frameworks such as Puppet, Ansible or Chef. And using Chocolatey for Windows package automation/management.

• Experience building new automation / devops environments.

• Experience with or understanding of virtualisation network overlay technologies such as VXLAN using EVPN.

• Experience with MySQL, and high-availability replication technologies such as master/slave replication, Galera active/active clustering.

• Some ability to work with C/C++, using gdb to analyse core dumps, strace, and perform other debugging or diagnostics, as part of troubleshooting issues.

• Experience with application and web development including PHP, Laravel, JavaScript etc.

• Experience with Windows Server environments using active directory, GPOs, groups and file permissions, WSUS.