Employment

IS Operations Manager

Posting Date: October 2009
Job Location: At home with broadband, in an American/European time zone. International travel required
Job Summary: The IS (Information Systems) Operations team is responsible for running the infrastructure that powers the Canonical and Ubuntu services. The role involves managing the teams of system administrators who maintain the infrastructure and services, developing processes for the efficient management of user requests and ensuring service level agreement (SLA) commitments are met. The successful candidate will be committed to service level excellence and and be comfortable working with engineers and senior management to help scale the operations of the IS Operations team to meet Canonical's growth plans.
Reports To: Director of Information Infrastructure

Key responsibilities and accountabilities:

• Managing globally distributed teams of system administrators.
• Establishing efficient processes for supporting users of Canonical's platforms across multiple timezones. Putting in place the tools to help measure the efficiency of processes over time.
• Liaising with internal teams to capture user and platform operational requirements. Working with the IS Foundations team to help define new platforms and technologies to be deployed.
• Defining, measuring and enforcing SLAs for critical platforms and services
• Ensuring the operational security of Canonical's platforms.

Required skills and experience:

• Strong grasp and experience of working with Linux server technologies and open source software in a systems administrator capacity.
• Demonstrated experience of developing processes and running an operations team in a larger server deployment environment
• Strong English language communication skills, especially in online environments such as mailing lists and IRC
• Ability to be productive in a globally distributed team through self discipline and self motivation.
• Good working knowledge of open source software development methodologies (familiarity with Ubuntu itself a plus)

Desirable skills and experience:

• Familiarity with ITIL a bonus.