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Submitted by techmgr on
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Hi, I would appreciate any feedback on the below job posting. Our recruiting team has only received 4 low-quality applications since this was posted 2 weeks ago. It's a national position as we have offices all over the US. There is no salary associated with the posting itself. I will start getting some pressure to remove the cover letter requirement. It's there for me as a weeder. I need someone who can just write things down. If they can't put together a basic cover letter, I don't want talk to them. Maybe there is something else in this description that is unappealing? Thank you in advance for any ideas. Jeanne

Description:

As a member of the Infrastructure-DevOps team, the Systems Engineer will contribute to the stability, reliability, and security of controlled IT infrastructure through establishing and adhering to operational standards and best practices.

Responsibilities:

  • Maintain all networked enterprise systems in a patched, secure, and stable state
  • Provide day-to-day support for cloud and collocated infrastructure
  • Develop and implement operational standards, processes, and documentation
  • Work closely with application support and monitoring teams to support customer-facing products
  • Participate in an on-call rotation for escalation during critical service outages
  • Work with project delivery and design teams to develop and implement new technical solutions

Required Skills:

  • Associate’s Degree
  • 4 years of Windows systems administration that includes IIS performance management
  • 2 years of Linux systems administration
  • 2 years of VMware host and virtual machine administration
  • 2 years of Active Directory or LDAP administration
  • Demonstrated knowledge of network services and security
  • Experience working in an organization that follows operational best practices including capacity planning, change control, certificate management, server patch management
  • Powershell or shell scripting
  • Experience with Ansible or another configuration management tool
  • Very good verbal and written communication skills
  • Effective time management, planning and organizational skills

Preferred Skills:

  • MS SQL Server administration
  • Configuring firewalls, load balancers, reverse proxies, Akamai, Nginx, PING Identity
  • Knowledge of Jenkins, Octopus, GitHub
  • Experience with Catchpoint, New Relic, PagerDuty, log management

  • Experience with any of these storage and backup technologies: Avamar, Zerto, NetApp, HP 3PAR
  • Experience or certifications in AWS cloud administration
  • Knowledge of DevOps concepts
Chris Zeller's picture
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Hello Tech Manager,

Disclaimer: I work for a modest, privately-owned recruiting agency. That's going to make you think certain things -- some are true and some are not. This isn't a sales pitch and anything not directly related to this thread should be taken offline and out of the forums. If you're so inclined, I'm easy to find on LinkedIn.

That said, and in the spirit of the MT Forums, I shared the job description that you provided with one of my colleagues who has been recruiting in the Tech space for the last 10 years or so. His expertise exceeds mine and he was kind enough to both provide his assessment and to make some recommendations.

I hope that you'll find his reply helpful. I've copied it, unedited, below.

Chris

Assessment and Recommendations

At least I can understand what they are looking for, but this looks like it was written by somebody that does not know what DevOps Systems Engineer is or does.

The JD reads like a cross between a vanilla Systems Engineer and a DevOps Engineer role.  They have to decided what they want.

I would ask: Are you looking for a Windows/Linux Systems Engineer? OR Are you looking for a DevOps Systems Engineer?  Ask her what they really want and what the Title is.

I think the role should be titled DevOps Engineer Below are some more responsibilities they may want to add to the JD

Manage systems, infrastructure and applications through automation that

support self sufficiency

● Deploy, support, and monitor new and existing services, platforms, and application stacks

● Use scale testing to measure, report, tune, and optimize system performance

● Develop tools to improve our ability to rapidly deploy and effectively monitor services in a

large-scale AWS environment that is eventually moving to microservices.

● Collaborate with team and others to share operational best practices

 

Qualifications

UNIX/Linux-based large-scale web operations role.

years managing, large-scale AWS production workloads

years experience managing environments in the AWS Cloud

● Expert scripting knowledge, specifically for systems automation.

● UNIX/Linux systems administration background.

● Knowledge of most of these: data structures, relational and non-relational databases,

networking, Linux internals, filesystems, web architecture, and related topics

Experience with configuration and deployment of containers at scale in AWS EKS, ECS, and

Fargate

● Experienced in configuration and management of CI/CD tooling like Jenkins or CircleCI, and

monitoring tools

● Experience with MS SQL Server

● Experienced in standard environment networking

 

techmgr's picture
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Chris, thanks so much for the input. If someone were keyword searching for "devops" I would expect them to not apply for this role, which is most definitely not a job posting for a DevOps engineer. It is entirely focused on traditional or "vanilla" systems engineering. "devops" only appears in the team name "Infrastructure-DevOps", because my team has both a traditional and devops side. And the final line of the Preferred skills section, "knowledge of devops concepts." 

I included the devops references for the traditional job description to attract someone who is interested in working in a shop that does have a growing devops side. Based on your feedback I will reconsider if that is perhaps confusing.

Thanks.

Chris Zeller's picture
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Neat. Let us know how it works out and if there's anything else that the community can help with.

techmgr's picture
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Update. 
I searched for the job title on several job boards and realized the job wasn't posted as local to 3 of our 4 locations. So it never had the visibility that it was intended to have. Lesson learned on my end. thanks again.