Director of Tech Ops (Hands-On)

We encourage creativity, value innovation, demand teamwork, expect accountability and cherish results. If you are a take charge, take initiative, get stuff done individual we want to talk to you! We have high aspirations for the company and are looking for the right people to help fulfill the dream. We strive to continually improve every aspect of the company and use cutting edge technologies and processes to delight our customers and rapidly increase revenues.

Our employees receive a generous benefits package, and enjoy working with and learning from the best and the brightest in our dynamic industry. We recognize and reward outstanding performance, and encourage growth. So whether you’re right out of school or at the height of your career, come join our team!

We are looking for a results-driven Director of Technical Operations who is passionate about leading edge technologies such as Hadoop, Solr, Cassandra, and JMS to join our team of outstanding professionals building the next breakthrough in B2B information services.

The ideal candidate is driven to build highly scalable, fault-tolerant, and easy to administer physical and network infrastructures. You are pro-active and organized, diligent about documentation, can’t sleep unless Nagios has everything covered, and don’t feel a job is done until it’s automated for the next time.

Responsibilities

The Director of Technical Operations is responsible for directing a team of systems engineers who provide support and maintenance of our 24×7 SaaS solution to our customers as well as to internal groups including engineering, marketing, sales, and QA.

1. Monitoring systems, databases, and networks for proper operation and performance.
2. Providing a 7×24 on-call support for the operations infrastructure.
3. Establishing recommended configurations for the applications operating environment, including computer hardware, storage, software, and configuration necessary to properly host our applications.
4. Ensuring that our technical staff is current and trained on the latest technologies as well as new releases of third-party software required for our products.
5. Establishing standard processes for diagnosing issues, tracking status, and escalating issues within and outside the group.
6. Establishing product and process improvement plans to reduce support effort and increase product availability and scalability.
7. Establishing operational objectives, strategies, and work plans to improve current operations as well as planning for future products and customer requirements.
8. Establishing and assuring adherence to budgets, schedules, work plans, and performance requirements.
9. This role involves technical implementation and cross-functional collaboration to meet our business goals in a fast-paced environment.
10. Working together with engineering teams on design, reliability, and maintenance issues.
11. The candidate is expected to be self-motivated, proactive, and solution-oriented. They must be willing to mentor and challenge their staff, lead technical projects, assist team members in meeting their individual goals, and promote a positive attitude and work culture.
12. The Director of Technical Operations has overall accountability for the work of their team, supporting their staff, coaching, and mentoring team members in their diagnosis and root cause analysis techniques, while at times, also directly leading the troubleshooting efforts for complex systems.

Qualifications

1. Network engineering: Candidate should possess an understanding of configuring and maintaining switched networks including VLANs, Layer 3 switch routing, link aggregation, and general troubleshooting. Familiarity with HP ProCurve switching is key.
2. Cisco ASA Security: Candidate should have experience with Cisco ASA v8.x operations including installation, general configuration, Site-to-Site IPSEC VPN, NAT/PAT, access lists, and failover.
3. Load Balancer Concepts: Experience with load balancer concepts including HA, VIPs, SNAT, and TCL-based load balancer scripting.
4. Enterprise LINUX: Fundamental knowledge of core Enterprise LINUX (Red Hat/CentOS) with a focus upon building, maintaining, securing, and performance tuning systems.
5. Infrastructure Engineering: Proven experience in capacity planning, performance tuning, and infrastructure architecture. Understanding of scaling horizontally and vertically web, application, and data systems. Understanding of network planning including subnets, DHCP, DNS, and Active Directory. Knowledge of systems hardware planning.
6. Virtual Infrastructure: Experience with virtual infrastructure platforms is a must.
7. Big Data Experience: Knowledge of SOLR, Hadoop, and Cassandra concepts, installation, tuning, and monitoring.
8. J2EE Platforms: Experience with J2EE platforms, specifically JBoss. Knowledge of JBoss installation, JVM tuning, and troubleshooting.
9. Monitoring Systems: SNMP-based NMS monitoring systems for performance trending analysis as well as Nagios platform alerting.
10. Telecom Management: VOIP systems and reporting.
11. Heterogeneous Environments: Experience with heterogeneous environments, specifically Windows Server and Enterprise LINUX platforms.
12. CapEx Planning: Experience with CapEx planning, contract/vendor relations, and asset inventory management.
13. Nice to Have: Microsoft SQL and MySQL basics including permissions, log management, backups, and tuning.