[jobs] Democracy Now! hiring systems administrator

[John Wallach]

Democracy Now!, a non-profit daily television/radio news hour, is 
seeking a reliable, innovative and friendly Systems Administrator to run 
day-to-day IT operations. Democracy Now! is a fast-paced live broadcast 
work environment driven by a team of committed and creative people with 
a passion for independent media. Our Systems Administrator is 
responsible for maintaining and monitoring office infrastructure as well 
as mission critical broadcast systems that we rely upon to produce and 
distribute our award winning news hour. Democracy Now! has a 
heterogeneous mix of primarily Linux and OS X systems and requires a 
system administrator experienced with both operating systems.

Responsibilities
* Maintain servers and network infrastructure that ingest, play out and 
transcode video for broadcast and Internet viewing
* Support all office IT including desktop support, printers, various 
shipping appliances and basic PBX support
* Provide technical support for internal and external users (user base 
with very diverse background and skillsets), including on-site support 
for 8am ET broadcast
* Evaluate and/or recommend purchases
* Liaise with vendors and service providers
* Respond to critical outages after hours

Core Requirements
* Comfort with most aspects of operating system administration; for 
example, managing processes and services, configuration of mail systems, 
system installation and configuration, printer systems, and fundamentals 
of security
* Familiarity with storage systems including: RAID, LVM, SMART, SATA/SAS 
and FC
* A solid understanding of the operating systems in use at the site 
(Linux, OS X and Windows); understanding of paging and swapping, 
inter-process communication, devices and what device drivers do, and 
filesystem concepts
* Familiarity with fundamental networking/distributed computing 
environment concepts; ability to configure file sharing (NFS/SAMBA); 
ability to query DNS records; understanding of basic routing concepts
* Strong bash scripting experience
* Experience with Linux (server distributions based on apt preferable), 
OS X, sh/bash scripting, essential command line tools (grep, awk, sed, 
nc, etc.), mencoder/mplayer/ffmpeg
* Strong interpersonal and communication skills; ability to write 
purchase justifications, train users in complex topics
* Independent problem-solving, self-direction
* Works well alone or on a team

Desirable Background and Skills
* Familiarity with Democracy Now!
* Programming background in any applicable language
* Ability to do minimal debugging and modification of C or Java programs
* Experience with bacula, nginx, Ruby on Rails, FORK, mysql, qmail, 
JIRA/Confluence, java web apps, asterisk

This full-time New York City-based position with compensation based upon 
experience.  Democracy Now! is an Equal Opportunity Employer that 
actively recruits women, people of color, persons with disabilities, and 
persons with diverse gender and sexual identities.

To apply, please submit a resume and cover letter to job (at) 
democracynow (dot) org with “Systems Administrator” as the subject.  No 
phone calls.