We’re baking a great email service. We need someone to tend the ovens.

CakeMail is looking for an operations engineer and Linux system administrator to handle its Linux-based infrastructure. If you’re looking to join a fast-growing software company and have the operations savvy to run a high-traffic, production-grade Internet platform, we want to hear from you.

Responsibilities:

• Install, configure, and maintain a Unix/Linux-based environment
• Deploy monitoring and logging tools to keep things running smoothly and reduce downtime
• Work with internal users and assist support teams with problem resolution when things go wrong
• Ensure redundant, highly available production systems using backups and load balancing
• Define, implement, and regularly test disaster recovery procedures
• Document security, disaster recovery, network topology, and maintenance procedures, avoiding surprises and ensuring that everyone’s on the same page

Skills & experience

• You should be intimately familiar with performance tuning in a Linux environment, writing scripts and compiling services such as Apache and PHP, as well as MySQL optimization.
• You should also be comfortable with network monitoring and TCP/IP, and know your way around a sniffer. You know how to tell why things are slow, and can read packet traces to get to the bottom of things—particularly when those things are VPNs, DNS, DHCP, NFS, SMTP (Postfix), and SNMP.
• You’ll be expected to maintain strict security practices including access control lists, regular patch regimens, version control management, and audits. You’ll also set up monitoring with Nagios or Cacti
• You’ll also understand the relationship between performance and load, and be able to join in capacity planning and budgeting exercises.
• You know how to work in a high-availability environment, relying on load-balancers, technologies like drbd and heartbeat, DNS management, clustering, and hot-hot database configurations to reduce the impact of outages on end users.

The right candidate will also be a self-starter, able to set their own priorities and own their part of the business, reporting to the executive team. Because of the international nature of the position and direct customer interaction, strong written and spoken English is required—but French is always an asset.

Make no mistake: This is a dynamic, exciting environment, with all the long hours, maintenance windows, and emergencies that entails. But if you’re in IT operations, you are already quite familiar with this responsibility. The upside is that this is also a chance to be part of the core team building a new Internet offering at one of Montreal’s hottest new technology companies. If you’re good at operations and have the backbone for the pace of hi-tech, let’s talk.