WonderProxy is looking for a part-time sysadmin to join our team!

Update - We're no longer accepting new candidates for this position.

WonderProxy is the premier provider of proxy servers for localization testing around the world. We have servers in 87 countries and 257 cities around the globe, which makes for some exciting challenges. We’re looking for someone to help carry our projects forward, as well as handle some of the regular maintenance that comes with managing a network this large.

We’re a remote first team, collaborating over Slack, Email and Google docs. Your teammates are in: Montreal, Waterloo, and Toronto, Canada, Bergen, Norway, and Washington DC, USA. We’re also a self funded start-up (or possibly “Company”). We use a unique business model where we charge our customers money and use that money to pay expenses. It’s pretty revolutionary, but we think it might take off.

If you join our team expect to work a lot with our senior developer and our co-founder/sysadmin. Learn more about your prospective team members on our team page. You will be reporting to the co-founder/president.

There’s a series of lists below to give you a better idea of what we’re up to. If this seems interesting to you please send me an email paul at wonderproxy.com, including your resume. WonderProxy is interested in building an awesome diverse team. We encourage people from traditionally under-represented groups in tech to apply. This is a part time position (~20-30hrs/week), so you’ll have some flexibility in choosing which hours you would like to work. There will need to be some overlap with normal New York office hours.

While we thank everyone for their interest, only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

Our Ideal Candidate

• Has a good background in Linux and networking
  • We push a fair number of bytes; we transferred 21TB yesterday. This can lead to issues for us or with some of our suppliers. Being able to dig in past big surface issues like “packet loss” and diagnose the issue would be super.
• Has spent time installing, configuring, and working with Debian
  • Trying to migrate us to CentOS is a non-starter, but we do admire your enthusiasm.
• Likes tackling problems they’ve never seen before
  • So many things can go wrong! It’s a whole new world of possibilities!
• Understands that “new and shiny” isn’t necessarily the best direction to pull a company.
  • Migrating production technology doesn’t stop at “it runs”, it runs the gamut of “what are the failure modes”, “what does it look like when it’s having trouble”, and “how does it behave when something else breaks”.

Technology we use to manage our network

• Debian
• Puppet
• Nagios
• Cacti
• SmokePing
• DataDog
• Proxmox

Technology we use to serve our customers

• Apache
• Squid
• libreswan/xl2tp
• PHP
• Javascript (ReactJS, Node)
• Go
• MySQL
• MongoDB
• AWS: S3, Athena
• Docker

What sort of projects are on the horizon

• Revamp our Puppet module for webservers to Debian 9, working with our senior developers to manage that migration
• Provision a portion of our infrastructure on Amazon (or similar)
• Improve our machine provisioning to automate more (e.g. firewall rules for database to webserver connections, joining a new MongoDB instance to the replica set, updating connection strings)
• Migrate a backend service that takes screenshots globally from PhantomJS to Headless Gecko/Webkit.
• Upgrade from Nagios to Icinga
• Offer HTTPS proxy services (in addition to HTTP)
• Power a VPN offering with SoftEther

What happens day to day

• Servers have problems, when you’ve got ~250 of them something is always on 🔥. Some problems matter more than others.
• Setting up new machines, we’re always trying to grow our network.
• Working on longer term projects

What’s unique about WonderProxy

• While we’ve worked to standardize on Debian, we do work with ~200 different hosting providers, which exposes us to a lot of unique control panels, virtualization systems, and problems.
• Our systems run the gamut from running on bare metal hardware, to virtualized in the cloud, to chromeboxes running in our friends’ closets
• Our network is global: 87 countries.
• Simple monitoring tasks get complicated when your infrastructure is global. A server might respond to health checks from London and Tokyo, but not New York.
• We work hard during the work day, then go home and don’t work anymore. We all worked really late once, when the RAID on our primary server 💩 itself, that was in 2015. We’d like that to not happen again.
• Despite being small we have a parental leave policy, the main thrust of which you can read on our blog. Being small doesn’t mean you can’t be nice to your employees.
• Our website isn’t our product. Sure, wonderproxy.com is where people come to sign up, but the product is actually our proxy servers.
• We have great stories about the challenges in getting hardware installed in unique places. Do you know how much of a pain it is to get a server in Peru? We do.

So that's what we're up to, and how we're doing it. If lending a hand seems like something you would be great at, send me an email with your resume: paul at wonderproxy.com. WonderProxy is interested in building an awesome diverse team. We encourage people from traditionally under-represented groups in tech to apply.

We're a Canadian company, if you're in Canada we'd probably like to hire you as an employee. If you're elsewhere we're open to that, but it will probably need to be a contract position as we're not equipped to hire employees elsewhere (except Norway, long story).

The WonderTeam on WonderCation, Corey (Sunglasses) does not work for WonderProxy, but if you want to talk poli-sci he’s your guy. Alexander (toddler) also not a WonderPerson, but if you want to talk Thomas he’s your little man.