Job openings/Operations Engineer - Special Projects

 YOU ARE ...

.. a skilled Infrastructure and Operations Engineer that would love to keep a global top 5 web site fast and highly available.

You're excited about joining a small and enthusiastic operations team in a non-profit organization with a huge global impact. You're passionate about the Wikimedia mission and want our transactional systems to hum and purr. You enjoy working with open source solutions, solving complex problems autonomously, while flexibly working with your colleagues (including volunteers) who may be at the opposite site of the globe. You highly value job satisfaction and want to use your expertise and talents for making the world a better place.

JOB TITLE

Operations Engineer [CLOSED]

REPORTS TO

Director of Operations

JOB PURPOSE

As Operations Engineer (Special Projects), your job involves designing, developing and optimizing the technical infrastructure and operations of the Wikimedia Foundation fundraising projects and maintaining the security, scalability and availability of the web properties. While this job focuses on special projects infrastructure and operations, you are expected to participate in other technical operation duties as well.

JOB SUMMARY

You are responsible for designing, implementing and improving the Wikimedia technical infrastructure that is supporting the needs of the Wikimedia projects (an example would be Wikimedia Foundation Fundraising) and the organization. You will work in tight collaboration with the rest of the operations team, as well as development engineering, other departments and the volunteer community.

Your duties include, but are not limited to the following:
 * Build and Support the Infrastructure for Wikimedia's special projects
 * Working closely with engineering team for code development and deployment
 * Large infrastructure projects, from research and design to implementation and maintenance
 * Server and service deployments, server and database installations and configuration management
 * Day to day optimizing, monitoring and maintenance of systems, including security response and database administration
 * Emergency response to system outages
 * Writing and updating internal documentation of systems and processes
 * Assisting in data center operations

Your working language will be English. You must be willing to travel, including a twice yearly trip to San Francisco for all-hands meetings.

Required Qualifications


 * You have advanced knowledge of LAMP stack technologies and 5+ years of relevant work experience
 * You are able to work independently where needed, and can work remotely as part of a globally distributed team
 * You are able to learn quickly. Relevant hands-on experience and eagerness to learn and try new concepts is more important than having certificates
 * Experience with configuration management systems and concepts (e.g. puppet, chef, cfengine)
 * Experience with operating system distribution packaging systems (e.g. dpkg, RPM)
 * Experience with large web site application architectures, including caching layers (memcached, HTTP caching), storage scaling concepts
 * Experience with internal infrastructure systems and concepts, e.g. DNS, NTP, LDAP
 * Experience with systems programming and development in scripting languages such as Python, PHP, Ruby, Perl
 * Experience with database administration (MySQL) and general storage systems
 * Experience with on-line payment systems and regulations around them
 * You are a proficient English speaker

Desired Qualifications


 * Experience living or working outside of your home country is a major plus.
 * Experience with CiviCRM and other fundraising software, and security requirements on payment systems is a major plus.
 * Experience with network administration (device setup, VLANs, BGP/OSPF routing, high availability protocols) is a plus
 * Experience with data center management (including power, space and cooling) is a plus
 * Experience with systems and network security is a plus
 * Understanding of the free culture movement is a plus
 * Experience working with online volunteers is a major plus.