Senior Linux Sys Administrator

Compensation: Commensurate
Benefits: Medical, Dental, 401K, Stock Options, and other benefits
Location: Cambridge, MA USA or Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Wear jeans and sneakers to work? CHECK.
Design, implement, and support a massive-scale Linux-based unified communications (UC) service provider environment? CHECK.
Work hands on with and contribute back to open-source projects like puppet or chef? CHECK.
Freedom to get your job done without a lot of red tape? CHECK.

Thinking Phone Networks (www.thinkingphones.com) is seeking well qualified applicants to join the back-end infrastructure team of a fast growing, enterprise business-focused Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) provider in both our Cambridge, MA and Ottawa, ON locations. An ideal candidate has at least (5) years hands on experience designing / architecting, implementing, and supporting a large scale, mission critical Linux environment across multiple data centers in the U.S and Europe. We are looking for candidates that are adept at automating the initial provisioning and on-going configuration management of the environments they are managing, since traditional methods will not scale. Experience with high availability service provider environments is a large plus.

The enterprise communications industry is in the midst of a fundamental shift. Traditional lines of demarcation between premise based PBX vendors, carriers, and new software based entrants is blurring. We believe that over the next 5 years a large portion of the existing enterprise UC market will be delivered via the cloud. Existing carriers and PBX vendors are struggling with delivering enterprise class cloud based solutions, and we believe this very large market opportunity is up for grabs by newer UCaaS entrants with a strong vision and ability to execute. Thinking Phone Networks is currently recognized by industry leading analysts as “visionaries” in the enterprise UCaaS space, and we are very well positioned to take advantage of this market shift.

This is your opportunity to join an exciting business that is poised for significant growth. You will work closely with the management team, who has a proven track record of building successful companies in the SaaS and enterprise software space. You will be responsible for designing and managing our all-Linux environment and supporting our future growth. In this position you will have both R&D and operational responsibilities with an emphasis on reliability, scalability and performance.

Soft Skills

• Candidate must be 100% professional, and be able to patiently and effectively communicate complex concepts to audiences with varying skill levels, in person, on the phone, and via email.
• Strong written and communications skills with a demonstrated comfort level authoring non-trivial documents with both text and graphical elements and using these documents to keep different types of constituents informed about what is going on.
• Excellent analytic and troubleshooting skills for problems that span multiple domains (applications, network, system, hardware).
• The position requires an organized, highly motivated individual that has excellent project and task management skills.
• The candidate must be a self-starter and thought-leader for the Linux Admin department and is expected to bring ideas to the table for consideration.

Hard Skills

• Expert-level familiarity with Linux OS (Redhat variants preferred).
• Advanced scripting experience required (e.g. bash, perl, python, ruby).
• Hands on experience with VMware ESX/ESXi hypervisor and vCenter tools.
• Experience with centralized configuration management tools, such as puppet, chef, cfengine.
• Operational experience with SIP, RTP, and XMPP protocols a big plus.
• Operational experience with OpenSIPS/Kamailio, Asterisk PBX, Openfire, ejabberd a big plus.
• Operational experience with Apache, Tomcat, Mysql a plus.
• Operational experience with SAN architectures, iSCSI, and cluster filesystems (e.g. OCFS2) a plus
• Experience building and supporting high performance / high availability architectures a plus.
• Experience with monitoring tools (e.g. Nagios, Munin, Smokeping, MRTG) a plus.
• Network engineering and troubleshooting skills beyond the Linux platform a plus.

Responsibilities

• Develop, test, productize, and support high availability Linux-based architectures to support our UC platform.
• Day to day management of distributed Centos nodes in a VMware environment
• Work with the Service Delivery team (SIP, RTP, XMPP layers), and Development (in-house developed application stack) to design and support our UC platform as a whole.
• Provide communication to management and other constituents about project status, maintenance activity and other notable events.
• Project based work including OS patching, centralized logging, automating the configuration management or particular pieces of the environment, load testing, exploring alternative tools to incorporate into the environment, etc.
• Rolling out major changes and provide Tier 2/3 support during maintenance windows.
• Document day-to-day activities in our ticketing system.
• Document designs and procedures in our wiki in a clear and concise manner.

About Thinking Phone Networks

Thinking Phone Networks is focused on unified communications-enabling enterprise organizations to drive dramatic business process improvement and was recently named a “Visionary” by leading analyst firm Gartner, Inc. Our award-winning ThinkingSuite cloud ecosystem combines a powerful analytics engine and application integration with comprehensive unified communications capabilities on a single hosted platform. ThinkingSuite communications services are deployed by hundreds of leading-edge enterprises at thousands of locations around the globe. Visit us at www.thinkingphones.com.