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FSFE is looking for a systems administrator and architect

Please note that this position is no longer open for applications.
The Free Software Foundation Europe was founded in 2001 and has gone through a tremendous growth since then, both in the number of volunteers and staff, and also in the complexity of our technical infrastructure and the number of services we run and offer for both internal and external use. We're currently looking for a system administrator and architect that, for a limited time, can support us in our work to migrate our services to a new infrastructure.

The migration project will move our services to a new infrastructure and revise the services we currently offer. The goal of the project is to make the infrastructure more coherent, with less dependencies, and with a separation of services that make it easier for volunteers to manage and help the organisation manage individual services in the long term.

Who we're looking for

We're looking for a senior system administrator or systems architect that can work in close coordination with our existing system administrators, staff and volunteers, to support our migration project through all of its stages, starting with the archaeological challenge of creating a high level overview of our services and their dependencies, and ending with the migration of our core services. Key skills will include technical documentation, virtualization environments, MTAs (Postfix), database servers and web services.

What we need to do

The person we're looking with will be tasked with the following. Please note that the first steps are more detailed than the latter steps, and we'll work together to continuously revise this plan as we go. All of this will also involve coordination with others, and a lot of information, especially for the first parts, can be gotten from existing documentation or from other system administrators.

1. Create a high level service documentation, with a focus on (for each service):
   1. Authentication mechanisms
   2. Code base (custom work, patches, or off the shelf components)
   3. Interdependencies with other services
   4. Physical / virtual infrastructure location
   5. Usage (estimate usage from logs etc, as well as a brief synopsis of who the main users are: external, internal, etc)
2. Additional documentation that may be needed for specific services (such as mail), the nature of which will need to be discussed and determined at a later time, when the first high level overview is complete.
3. Analyse the current services and propose a new architecture, focusing on the services and the dependencies between them.
4. Provide a migration plan that detail the steps needed to be taken in order to successfully migrate our existing services to the new architecture and infrastructure.
5. Migrate, and support the migration, of core services to it, including shutting down and removing old services in an orderly fashion.

Location and travel

The FSFE system administrators work largely remotely, and most of the work can be done from anywhere in the world. It's beneficial for communication that the person helping us is roughly located in Europe, and one or two trips may be needed to meet with other system administrators and staff.

More information

If you think that you're the right person, know someone who is, or just want more information, you're more than welcome to reach out to FSFE's executive director Jonas Öberg, preferrably by email to jonas@fsfe.org.