Senior System Engineer

Reports to: Head of Technology

Our vision is to see that everyone has access to quality education regardless of their location or background. We do this by transforming learning spaces, empowering learners (which includes educators) with the knowledge and skills needed to be creative communicators, collaborators, and changemakers in their own communities and across the globe. We believe that with the right character, creative spirit, and drive for excellence, lifelong learners can thrive.

Role Summary

This role is for a senior systems or devops engineer and will be responsible for the successful operation and support of our platform services. These services cover our compute capacity (Kubernetes, Docker, VM), data infrastructure (fluent, Elasticsearch, MySQL), monitoring services (Prometheus, Grafana, APM) and DevOps environment (GitLab inc. pipelines/runners, Vault). The role will also be responsible for overseeing platform policies and procedures to ensure the integrity and availability of customer facing applications

Manage, maintain, monitor and optimize application and infrastructure systems worldwide including:

Large farms, Clustering, Load balancing, Network administration, High availability System Tuning, Shell Scripting, Virtualization, Security, Performance Monitoring, Troubleshooting, Add/Move/Delete and Maintenance activities.

Initiating actions in case of non-conformity.

Ensure 24x7 availability of production application systems.

Work closely with our development & operations team and our customers to provide high quality delivery services.

Perform routine audits of systems.

Maintain & report system performance statistics.

Monitor, optimize and allocate system resources required for our applications across diverse environments, design and implement test & proof-of-concept environments.

Safeguard application information against accidental or unauthorized damage, modification or disclosure.

Build and maintain redundant systems and procedures for high availability and disaster recovery.

Implement and maintain change control and testing processes for application and infrastructure software modifications.

Implement procedures for rolling out application and system releases, service packs and hotfixes.

Assist in the design and implementation of new architecture components.

Coach and train delivery team and other key stakeholders when necessary to help adopt new technologies & processes.

Actively contribute to the knowledge sharing and documentation of the best practices.

Define and direct elements of the roadmap based on department and company strategies.

Mentorship of others in your team to achieve delivery objectives, support professional development and build sustainability within our ecosystem.

Optimise and develop SOP s to drive delivery performance

Ability to create good working relationships across multiple teams.

Experience with the DevOps practices and methodologies.

Experience with PaaS and IaaS services from the major providers.

Experience defining and managing end-to-end system requirements.

Senior Linux Engineer with at least 4 years of experience and proven working experience in installing, configuring and troubleshooting large UNIX/Linux based environments (RedHat/CentOS)

Advanced knowledge of one of the web server products - Nginx/Apache.

Collaborating with other technical and non-technical team members.

Ability to leverage Root Cause Analysis (RCA) process for technical problem solving.

Experience deploying, maintaining and optimizing various virtualization and containerization platforms (e.g., VMware, RHEV, Docker, OpenVZ)

Experience setting up and managing various disaster recovery solutions.

Ability to design and implement secure backup strategies.

Experience setting up and maintaining build & automation software (Jenkins, Ansible, Puppet).

Advanced scripting skills (Bash, Python).

Experience with Vault for credential / secret management

Experience with EFK + Grafana/Prometheus for service monitoring (deployment and usage)

Experience with Ansible for automating common activities such as upgrades, horizontal scaling and general patching of server nodes

Experience with Docker/Kubernetes/Openshift

Fundamental networking knowledge (OSI network layers, TCP/IP stack).

Understanding of main clustering infrastructure design patterns and its differences (load balancing, active-passive, multi-active).

Experience deploying and maintaining NFS/GlusterFS storage.

The ability to deploy, configure, maintain, performance tune and optimise the following technology stacks:

SQL databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL)

NoSQL databases (MongoDB, DynamoDB, etc)

Redis, Memcached

The ability to deploy, configure, maintain, tune and optimise performance of the following technology stacks will be an advantage:

NodeJS applications server

Kubernetes

Red Hat OpenShift