This is a remote position.

Position Title: Principal Systems Engineer

Comprehensive health benefits include - medical, dental, vision, 401k, flexible spending account, paid sick leave and paid time off, quarterly performance bonus, training, career growth and education reimbursement programs.

At Ziply Fiber, our mission is to elevate the connected lives of our communities every day. We’re delivering the fastest home internet in the Northwest, with a focus on areas traditionally underserved by mainstream internet companies. And as our state-of-the-art fiber network expands in WA, OR, ID and MT, so does our need for team members who can help us grow and realize our goals.

We may be building internet, but we are reaching real people. We strive to build relationships and provide customers and communities with refreshingly great experiences.

We emphasize our values in all our interactions:

Genuinely Caring: Our customers and colleagues are people, and quite possibly our neighbors. We put ourselves in their shoes and give them our full attention.

Empowering You: We empower our customers to choose the products that best meet their needs, and we support our employees to implement solutions that elevate the experiences of our customers and coworkers.

Innovation and Improvement: We always look for ways to make the experiences of our customers – and each other – better.

Earning Your Trust: We earn trust by communicating simply and transparently as real people, not as a corporation.

Job Summary:

The Principal Systems Engineer is responsible for planning, designing, implementing and maintaining Ziplys’ expanding systems infrastructure with a focus on automation and efficiency. This will include designing and maintaining KVM/OpenStack hypervisor clusters, Kubernetes Clusters, Linux and Windows virtual machines, Ceph storage area networks and infrastructure automation. As a key member of the Network Systems team, the Principal Systems Engineer will play a pivotal role in shaping our technological strategy and direction. This role demands an individual capable of making high-level decisions that will impact the future of our network systems and automation.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

The Essential Duties and Responsibilities listed below are a range of duties performed by the employee and not intended to reflect all duties performed:

• Lead and contribute to the development of custom code to integrate platform components, fill tooling gaps and solve potentially unique situations.
  
• Provide mentorship and training to the rest of the Network Systems Team.
  
• Migrate legacy systems and infrastructure to new virtualized or containerized environments.
  
• Provide peer review and guidance on code and perform quality assurance tasks.
  
• Responsible for creation of and contribution to; processes, standards, technical documentation and design diagrams.
  

· Configuring and maintaining application servers, troubleshooting application-related issues, and continuously enhancing system performance to meet the evolving needs of our business and customers.

· Deploying, maintaining and optimizing a range of critical applications, including FreeRADIUS, Speedtest Servers, Element Management Systems, VoIP systems and others.

· Developing and implementing strategies that minimize downtime and ensure reliable access to our critical network services.

• Employ modern CI/CD pipelines using DevOps tooling.
  
• Write and maintain technical standards and documentation.
  
• Conduct technical research and maintain viable knowledge of technology trends, new software and best practices.
  

· Establishing system/data integrations to enhance existing or establish new processes.

· Must be available to work regular business hours Pacific Standard Time.

· Must also be available to work on-call, evenings and weekends as needed.

· Performs other duties as required to support the business and evolving organization.

Qualifications:

· Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Business Management or related field or equivalent experience.

· Minimum of five years of engineering and application experience working with development teams and system administration teams.

· Minimum of five years of work experience in a large, geographically distributed server architecture.

· Minimum of five years of experience working with development teams for functional requirements on distributed server systems running internally developed applications.

· Minimum of three years of experience working for large telecommunications companies.

· Proven track record of leading large-scale engineering projects, with a focus on Network Systems.

· Experience with large scale software upgrades and versioning changes across multiple servers.

· In depth knowledge of service provider systems, applications and processes for IT organizations.

· In depth knowledge of service provider products, services and offerings for commercial and residential services.

· Hands on application experience:

o Network Element Management Systems, FreeRADIUS

o Deploying/configuring Nginx, Apache and core Linux subsystems like bind, iptables, etc.

o Version control (eg Git/Gitlab, Github)

o CI/CD (e.g. Github Actions, Jenkins or equivalent)

o Docker containerization and clustering (Kubernetes)

o Configuration management tools (e.g. Ansible, Puppet)

· Knowledge of software life cycle management with emphasis on inception, defining processes and developing technical business requirements.

· Experience with Agile (Scrum, Kanban) software delivery methodology.

· Ability to write Ops guides/MOPs/etc. as needed.

· Effectively communicate between non-technical people and deeply technical SME’s.

· Ability to communicate effectively across multiple large organizational structures.

· Driven to identify and provide effective solutions as needed.

· Must have the availability to be on call in a 24/7 server environment if required.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

· Ability to work independently and apply sound judgment and reasoning skills to a variety of situations.

· Broad knowledge of the concepts, best practices and principles of Systems Engineering including design, implementation and testing.

· Ability to multi-task and collaborate effectively with other personnel to meet deadlines.

· Strong verbal and written communication, attention to detail and organizational skills.

· Ability to work within critical deadlines and rapidly changing priorities and schedules.

· Understanding and familiarity with Ansible, Jinja, Terraform and other Infrastructure as Code tools.

· Understanding and familiarity with computing technologies such as; Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, containers, and virtualization technologies (KVM, OpenStack, VMWare, etc).

· Knowledge of IP/Ethernet networking fundamentals.

· Excellent analytical skills.

· Strong organizational, multi-tasking and prioritizing skills.

· Ability to work independently and apply sound judgment and reasoning skills to a variety of situations, multi-task and collaborate effectively with other personnel to meet deadlines.

· Ability to translate highly technical information into non-technical terms and user documentation.

· Strong verbal and written communication, attention to detail and familiarity with compliance concepts.

· Ability to work within critical deadlines.