IP Street is looking for a Senior Devops engineer!

We’re looking for a smart person to be our only Devops person now, and become the team lead as the group grows. If you know someone who fits the bill, send them this post!

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Title: Senior Devops Engineer

Reports to: VP Engineering

Location: Seattle, WA

About IP Street
Founded in 2009, IP Street develops and markets software to help corporations, law firms, and research firms better analyze patent-related information. We make IP data easy to get, use, and understand.

Learn more about IP Street by visiting www.ipstreet.com.

Summary
We’re a small company that’s developed a new way to visualize and data-mine intellectual property. You’ll be part of an innovative, high-performance engineering team that’s committed to delivering our product using the best technologies and software development processes.

Our technology stack is almost all OSS, and our server-side code is Python/Django. We use esoteric search technologies. Our QA and production servers are managed servers and VMs, running Linux. We deploy with Fabric.

Most of the job will focus on:

• Monitoring, upgrading, and diagnosing our production system
• Being personally responsible for our production system’s availability and reliability
• Being the technical contact with our hosting providers
• Collaborating with developers to optimize code. And understanding and fixing product bugs yourself
• Direct involvement with new features’ design and performance projections

We’re looking for someone who is hands-on, smart, and energetic. We’ll consider someone who wants to remain an individual contributor, but we ideally want someone who wants to become the Devops lead as the company grows. We don’t know how big this function will become, or what areas of emphasis it will have. But we do know it will expand, and be extremely important to our success, as the user base grows.

So, we’d like this hire to become the Devops lead as the team expands. You’ll be able to set the pace for the group as you build it. And naturally, the future work will include team building, leadership, and management.

This position is ideal for someone who doesn’t have team management experience now, but wants to develop it as their group grows. The rest of the IP Street team will support you in this, if you’ll step up to the challenge when it comes!

Key Responsibilities

• Set up automated monitoring and alerts for our systems, and establish our corporate monitoring practices
• Set up, and/or work with consultants on setting up, master/slave farms for some subsystems, such as Redis, Lighttpd, and PostgreSQL
• Do system and high-level application performance analysis, such as: Monitoring server load over time; adjusting configurations of technologies such as lighttpd, httpd, and memcache; understanding “where the time is going” in problematic code paths; and knowing when to call in a technology expert
• Deploy hot fixes and regular releases. This includes preparing an upgrade plan, ensuring we can rollback, and communicating the schedule and status to the company
• Continually look for ways to improve our system management, e.g. in security, efficiency, and employee workload
• Set up and manage our QA staging system when we enter a release cycle
• Be our first response level for all production problems. Quickly triage them according to severity, probable cause, and workarounds
• Design and implement an operational coverage plan for when we need to expand beyond 5 x 8 support
• Work with the developers to characterize and understand bugs, and fix code bugs yourself

Qualifications

• 7+ years experience in devops. Experience in managing 20+ servers (and you aren’t hesitant about managing more of them)
• 2+ years real-world, serious Python coding experience
• Solid experience in deploying code to, configuring, and working with virtual hosting environments and Linux (Debian family) systems
• Solid experience with modern software engineering techniques and tools
• Excellent judgement in assessing problems. When you encounter a symptom with incomplete information, you’re comfortable choosing a technique or process to deal with it, and improvising as you go
• Familiarity with different approaches to expanding operational coverage
• Points awarded for experience in profiling or tuning databases or search engines (e.g., Postgres, Redis, and Solr), even if only at the system level
• Points awarded for experience with Fabric, Munin, Nagios, configuration management tools, centralized logging services or tools, Nginx, and HAProxy or similar load balancers / reverse proxies
• You would describe your skills as spanning coding, system administration, Linux, and configuring and administering OSS technologies
• You don’t just learn how things work. You also learn why!
• You’re self-sufficient and a self-starter, and confident in setting standards
• You’re eager to build a team from the ground up
• Excellent team and communication skills
• Bachelors Degree or equivalent in Computer Science or Software Engineering

To submit your resume, or for more information, contact john @ this site’s domain.