[Osmf-talk] Community consultation: plans to hire a Senior Site Reliability Engineer

[Guillaume Rischard]

Hello all,

The board would like to consult the community on our hiring plans for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer.

This is the first position based on the hiring framework which osmf-talk discussed <https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/2020-July/006966.html> a few days ago. We want to adopt the framework and publish the position at the upcoming board meeting with improvements based on the feedback we've received, and have used the draft framework as a provisional one until then.

Please provide feedback here on osmf-talk before our 2020-07-30 board meeting <https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Board/Minutes/2020-07>.

Happy mapping

Guillaume, for the OSMF board


Senior site reliability engineer, OpenStreetMap Foundation

We’re looking for a site reliability engineer who can help the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s sysadmin team manage the growth in the demand for its services.

Keeping core technical infrastructure which the OpenStreetMap project relies on running is one of the key responsibilities outlined in the foundation’s mission statement <https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Mission_Statement>. So far, volunteers have admirably filled this role. However, the growth of the project is increasing the demands on our infrastructure.

The person will work full time, closely with the current team of volunteer sysadmins, and with one board member who will communicate what tasks we would like to have completed.

If possible, OSM would greatly benefit from one of our current volunteers being able to spend more time on maintaining and improving our services. We will explore this possibility before soliciting offers from a broader range of candidates.

Scope of work
Management, installation, configuration, maintenance, and improvement of infrastructure (hardware, software, network, data centres…)
Supporting, mentoring and enabling volunteers and eventual future coworkers
Enforcement of usage policies
Interaction with users, dealing with user requests
First line of answering user tickets
Management of github issues <https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues>
Management of relationships with data centres
Coordinating projects to work on with the Board
Helping the Board establish long-term infrastructure plans
Managing abuse
Responding to outages

For example, current project ideas include:
AWS auditing and improvements
Improving, centralising and reworking logging, monitoring, reporting, and alerting
Improving and reworking the tile serving architecture and infrastructure
Moving some infrastructure to containers or cloud. Moving to ‘server as a resource’ and away from 1 service = 1 server.
Improving the continuous integration and deployment pipelines
Upgrading servers to Ubuntu 20.04
Testing and improving backups
Improving redundancy and availability of services
Improving disaster recovery preparations
Improve policy documents and anti-abuse enforcement
Improve onboarding Documentation
Modernising runtime environments
Network upgrades in Amsterdam
Implementing Zero Downtime Upgrades (web, API, possibly other deployments)
Improved storage and hosting of community data (aerial imagery, maps, photos…)
Forum software upgrade
Relaunch of GPX planet dumps <https://planet.openstreetmap.org/gps/>

Profile

We want the person providing the services to be great communicator, with an excellent command of written and spoken English, and willing and able to collaborate online.

They should be a creative and inventive problem-solver.

Being already involved in OpenStreetMap as a contributor, or experience with other Open Source or Open Data or volunteer communities, will be helpful (though not required) to understand how our community works.

The sysadmin team and board are volunteers who have full-time jobs outside OpenStreetMap. While we don’t expect the person to hit the ground running, the volunteers won’t be able to communicate with the person all the time or help with everything. They should be able to self-organise and to enjoy finding out about things themselves.

Technical requirements

Must
Ubuntu or at least Debian server administration
Nginx
Apache
Shell scripting
Git and github
HTTP
AWS

Should
Squid
DNS
Chef
Load balancing and high availability architectures
Containerisation

Could
Varnish
Python
Mapnik
Nominatim
Leaflet
Vector tiles
Docker
Postgresql, postgis
Mediawiki
Ruby, Rails

Employment/contracting structure

The person will work from their premises, and most of the time determine their schedule.

The OSMF is incorporated in England, deals frequently with UK entities, and has most of its servers in York, London and Amsterdam. A base in the UK or at least where travel to these places is easy would make some things easier, but it’s not required. The OpenStreetMap Foundation is a global organisation; working with people in different time zones and handling related scheduling constraints is expected.

If the person is in the UK, IR35 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IR35> legislation makes it a lot simpler for everyone if the OSMF hires them as an employee, rather than a contractor or similar.

The contract would in any case be permanent, not fixed-term or temporary.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/attachments/20200724/c19cf01c/attachment.htm>