Manager of Technical Operations
Ontela is seeking a Director of Technical Operations who will own both our production datacenter and corporate IT infrastructure. This is a critical position: our business depends on making our customers happy, and our customers are wireless carriers – notoriously demanding around uptime, reporting, and service guarantees. To pull this off you’ll need the skill and experience to be able to operate all facets of our IT infrastructure, both for our production services and for our internal IT systems. Your responsibilities will span planning, system build-outs, increasing capacity, reliability and uptime improvements, monitoring design, SLA enforcement, compliance, privacy policy, data security, and vendor management. You’ll be involved in our product architecture and business planning; in fact, initially you’ll be singularly responsible for our entire IT infrastructure.
You’ll need to work hand-in-hand with the product team, both generating and accepting requirements so that our production service meets all of our business goals; with the sales team, understanding change requests and ongoing support needs from customers post-deployment; and with the management team to drive efficiency and strategize for our future needs. We’re small, so you’ll be on point for an enormous variety of things and able to hone your skills in many ways. We’re growing, so you’ll be responsible for increasing the size of your team along with our business needs. Expect that on Day 1 you’ll be doing it all. Then you’ll build a team to help you execute, with opportunities to continue to grow with the business.
ABOUT ONTELA
Ontela is building software to wirelessly connect camera phones to digital imaging software and services. We’re fast-paced, product-focused, and team-based. Our offices are in historic Pioneer Square, the spectacular Smith Tower, and surrounded by fantastic coffee shops, gelaterias, and restaurants. We offer competitive compensation (salary, equity, bonus, and great benefits), and we’re small enough that your role will be critical in the success in our company.
We’re looking for great people who fit the following bill:
- Brilliant and creative problem solvers
- Passionate about solving problems
- Focused on goals, not methods
- Initiative to solve challenges, while balancing priorities
- Facilitate discussions, not arguments
- Understand business tradeoffs in the development process
- Teaching and contributing as well as listening and learning
- Empathy and respect for consumers
WHAT YOU’LL DO
You’ll own defining, designing, building, maintaining, and growing our technical operations, both internal and production. It will be hands-on to start with, but grow in scope quickly. You will work closely with just about everyone at Ontela, as well as our customers, partners, and vendors, to execute successfully. Roughly 80% of your team’s time will be spent in planning, coordinating, and maintaining our production environment hosted offsite. Your team’s tasks might include vendor selection, hardware and software deployment, developing internal processes for testing and deployment of our service, planning for capacity, creating reporting tools based on customer requirements, adding geographic redundancy to an existing system, working with support to resolve customer issues, documentation, and reporting on our performance of our SLAs. We’re currently on Microsoft operating systems and databases, but we might migrate towards another platform in the future. Roughly 20% of your team’s time will be spent maintaining our corporate environment, including network availability, security, email, remote access, deploying workstations and software, documentation, and license compliance. Additional requirements include periods of 24/7 availability and occasional travel and offsite work.
Some examples of what you might do:
- Sit in product design team meetings to ensure that the product is designed for maintainability and operability
- Write a whitepaper on our datacenter operations and layout, for internal documentation and/or for communication with our customers
- Connect to a server after hours to diagnose and repair it
- Meet with company executives to understand each team’s needs for network connectivity in the office – wired vs. wifi, required reliability, etc
- Develop requirements to build a budget – then execute against it
- Hire people to fill out your team
THE IDEAL CANDIDATE WILL EXHIBIT THE FOLLOWING QUALITIES
- Ability to set goals, then defend and be accountable for them
- Excellent problem solving skills
- Work with many different constituencies
- Outstanding communication skills, including both written and verbal
- Methodical and analytical approach
- Ability to juggle multiple projects and priorities
- Remain sane in a continually evolving environment
REQUIRED SKILLS
Product experience
- Windows 2003 Server, Exchange Server, and IIS administration
- SQL Server 2005 administration (deployment, administration, backup and recovery)
- Firewall, switch, load balancer and SAN administration
- Network architecture and deployment
- Sharepoint and VMware also a plus
Datacenter management best practices in
- Incident management
- High availability deployments
- Monitoring
- Backup and restore
- Disaster recovery
- Capacity planning, from facilities to servers to network
- Asset management, vendor selection and management, and purchasing
- Network, data, application, and physical security
- Application deployment and configuration management
Management, including
- Building and motivating a team of talented systems engineers/admins
- Prioritization of support requests as well as project-related items
- Status reporting, esp. on overall data center and application health and SLA compliance
- Budgeting
Customer communication (i.e., with mobile carrier staff):
- during and following incidents
- as needed to support capacity planning
- as required for support sales activities
QUALIFICATIONS
- 8+ years experience with the above
- 4+ years experience in production environments (100 or more servers)
- 4+ years experience in managing or otherwise closely monitoring and maintaining a data centre or similar mission-critical computer & network facility, preferably in an SaaS or Managed Services business
- Experience with providing technology services to telecommunications providers desired
- Knowledge of ITIL a plus
- Bachelor's degree preferred
- MCSE certification
Ontela is proud to be an equal opportunity employer.
This job description is also available in convenient PDF form here. If this sounds like you, send your resume and a cover letter to jobs@ontela.com!