operations engineer

At ResearchSpace https://www.researchspace.com/enterprise/, our mission is to provide the best possible Electronic Research Notebook to enable scientists to manage their research data. Thousands of scientists worldwide trust RSpace to securely store, navigate, retrieve, and share their work.
We are looking for an operations engineer, with prior experience working in a university IT department or industry, to meet the increasing operational requirements of a growing company in the scientific research sector. RSpace is deployed as a SaaS offering on AWS cloud and also on customer IT systems.
As we acquire more, larger customers, we have more work to do deploying and maintaining RSpace Enterprise in customer IT environments. We are looking to automate and streamline many of our deployment, monitoring and maintenance processes. We envisage a 50-50 time split between hands-on operational /sysadmin tasks and project work to improve our processes.
ResearchSpace is a small, globally-dispersed, but tightly-knit team. You will have autonomy in organising your working day and significant responsibility for maintaining the smooth running of RSpace for our customers.

Key responsibilities

1. Install and maintain RSpace for Enterprise customers.
   Working with customer IT staff and our onboarding team, you will install and configure RSpace to work within a customer IT environment, integrating with customer SSO mechanisms and data stores. RSpace is highly customisable, with integrations with many 3rd party vendors; these require bespoke configuration. Subsequent to installation you will monitor usage, recommend scaling solutions and perform OS, license and software upgrades. Much of the documentation for these activities is publicly available at https://researchspace.helpdocs.io/article/74oio40i7i-deploying-rspace.

2. Backup /disaster recovery

Maintain, test and enhance our operational procedures for both SaaS and on-prem deployments.

1. Maintain, update and secure all company and customer AWS resources.

Essential technical skills
• Strong current Linux admin skills on Debian / Ubuntu.
• Demonstrable competence in Bash scripting
• Core skills in setting up and running web applications: DNS, SSL, Apache web server, HTTP protocols.
• AWS core services EC2, Security Groups, EBS, S3, IAM, ALB, VPC/networking.

Desirable technical skills, knowledge, and experience
• MySQL admin and performance tuning.
• Familiarity with Version Control (specifically, Git / Github).
• Familiarity with RedHat Linux
• CI/CD - specifically Jenkins (including Pipeline).
• Authentication technologies SAML2, OAuth, Shibboleth.
• The majority of customers are research universities, so experience working in and/or with university IT departments is a plus.

Required personal qualities
• Highly articulate and literate in explaining complex solutions to stakeholders.
• Excellent verbal and written English.
• Courtesy and patience when dealing with on-prem customer IT staff.
• An enquiring mind into seeking causes of defects, with the resolve and ingenuity to fix better.
• Ability to organise and prioritise workload, managing on-call/responsive work with project work.

Work/life Balance
We understand you have a life outside work and we will respect your non-working and family time.
ResearchSpace is committed to creating a diverse environment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, or age.

Benefits
• Competitive salary based on experience and skills
• Fully remote role in a fully remote company.
• Be part of a fast-growing startup and create an impact

If you are interested, please apply by email to [email protected] quoting ref OPS2 with your CV and a short covering letter explaining why you'd like to join us and how you can contribute.
Reference ID: OPS-2
Job Types: Full-time, Permanent
Salary: £40,000.00-£55,000.00 per year
COVID-19 considerations:
Fully remote working - this will continue post Covid