Why we’re hiring a sysadmin
EDIT: we’ve hired an awesome sysadmin, but we still have some other roles open.
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dxw is recruiting at the moment, with several roles open, one of which is for a systems administrator. We think all these jobs are quite exciting, but the specs don’t do a terribly good job of explaining why. So, to the blogosphere!
We’ve been running a WordPress platform-as-a-service for a couple of years. It doesn’t have a proper name or a proper website, but it is quite cool. With it, we can quickly deploy load balanced environments, we can monitor everything centrally, enforce our hardened configurations everywhere (because we care about security), control what happens to outbound email, and more.
All our client websites, most of which are in central government, are currently hosted on it. Some examples: blog.gov.uk, discuss.bis.gov.uk, www.greatbusiness.gov.uk.
For quite a while, we’ve been in the process of turning this into a proper WordPress PaaS that anyone can sign up to and use. A bit like Heroku or Pantheon. But that work has largely stalled because routine-day-to-day sysadminning leaves us little time to do any work on new stuff. So, we figured it was time to add to the team.
The initial plan is to have someone new to do the routine monitoring, log analysis and first-line support, leaving our existing sysadmin time to work on new things and second-line issues. Over time, though, I’d expect the role (and team) to grow, and for the new person also to be building new things and helping guide the product towards bigger and better things.
For the right people we offer a 10am start, limitless coffee and sodastream, a brand new machine of your choice (with all the monitors you can eat), and a lovely team of geeks to work with.
If any of that sounds interesting, please do get in touch!