IT Technical Manager

Web design, development, programming and digital marketing company requires appropriately experienced and qualified tech/network manager to manage its internal and external (hosting) network, as well as customer support.  Working with external tech assistance and hosting company partners, the applicant would be the chief contact with these organisations, would manage the interface, build up systems and procedures for managing/monitoring all the servers, their software, configuration and security and work towards a consistent and proactive professional and up to date treatment of all to maximise and maintain uptime, reliability and resiliency.

The company has approximately 20 staff on a combined Windows and Linux internal network, as well as 20 external hosting servers (dedicated and shared), all operating in a LAMP environment.  The Company manages hundreds of websites, domain names and hosting accounts, mostly in a ‘managed hosting’ context, and it would be the applicant’s responsibility to look after the hosting performance of these servers with the assistance of other staff.

The successful applicant will also take over the management of customer support, to ensure a highly responsive, quality service is provided to clients, and that the supporting systems and procedures are maintained and continuously improved.

Reporting to the Managing Director and the Board, this is a management position so an organised, experienced, forward thinking, well-spoken, precise and professional network engineer/manager is required.  Able to develop, set and implement plans and procedures, and regularly produce accurate management reports, the candidate will be able to work well with colleagues, subordinates, clients and partner companies.  The role will also involve keeping the business up to date with new developments and security requirements, aiming towards best practice, and working with programmers to ensure security issues are known and plans created and engaged to eliminate them.

You will be experienced with managing Linux servers and networks in particular, and also have reasonable knowledge of Windows networking.  The ideal candidate will have a technical qualification and will be able to demonstrate an organised professional, meticulous and methodical approach which includes establishing and maintaining procedures and management systems, and being able to produce regular and useful management reports which convey this and progress on major projects.

This will be a full-time permanent position based in Northampton.  Salary depending on skills, qualifications and experience, expected to be within a £30-£40k pa range.

Summary of Typical Tasks & Responsibilities (not inclusive)

-          Take charge of internal and external networks, and security of them as well as the company’s IP

-          Server monitoring and reporting (Afick, Zabbix)

-          Firewall consolidation

-          Devise and enforce standard server set-ups & config

-          Standard pc setups

-          PC consolidation

-          Server management, cost and hosting reporting

-          Custom server investigation and specification to client requirements

-          Virtual machine setup and config

-          GIT setup and config

-          Software management (including licencing, renewals etc.)

-          Manage support function (incl reporting) and supervise Support Coordinator

-          Supervise website/domain/dns site-ups, transfers and go-live processes

-          Manage security scans regime and PCI scans/works

-          Design and deliver regular and one-off management reports

-          New relic reports, continuous improvement planning

-          Planned improvements of infrastructure, software and monitoring

-          Budgeting for replacement kit/software/licenses

-          Keep track of hosting accounts and domains, and related budgeting/pricing

-          Audit plans for all functions

-          Audit all functions

-          Manage, maintain and improve on back-ups and related processes

-          MS exchange email process improvements (alternative, cost effective back-up routine)

-          Conduct Blacklisting and Hacking investigations with other staff

-          Housekeeping processes (file storage/clean out etc. etc.)

-          php5.6 upgrade programme

-          php7 upgrade programme

-          Cyber Essentials – badge attainment

-          Consideration of ISO 27001 attainment

-          Anything else arising – propose, plan, resource

-          Identifying cost saving opportunities

-          Managing server updates, upgrades and migrations

-          Responsible for maintaining CPD and keeping up to date with all of the above

Technical Knowledge & Experience

o   Required

Networking hardware and software (switches/routers/domain controllers etc)

Windows/Linux onsite/offsite technologies

PC Hardware

DNS Management & Settings (including MX, SPF and email/blacklist related issues)

GIT

Digital Certificates & SSL

Linux (ideally CentOS)

·         LAMP stack

·         Firewall (IP tables)

·         Basic bash knowledge

·         Setting up/managing backups (data and file incremental)

MySQL

·         Required

·         Configuration

·         SQL syntax

CPanel

·         Basic setup and management (administering sites etc)

o   Helpful

Virtualisation (Virtualbox etc)

Linux (continued)

·         Firewall (ipset and fail2ban)

·         Advanced bash knowledge (automated tasks/error catching/retrying commands etc)

·         SSH tunneling (specifically port forwarding)

·         Apache/MySQL/PHP(session/redis) Clusters

·         Compiling C source code (such as PHP)

MySQL (continued)

·         Advanced SQL knowledge, such as:

Joining to dynically generated temporary tables based on real and non-real data

groupconcat (nested)

find_in_set

CPanel

·         Configuring customer compiled instances of PHP

Zabbix

·         Setting up new servers

·         Configuring templates and monitoring

·         Creating custom monitors and templates (such as remote checks via remote bash files)

Affick

·         Setting up new servers

·         Configuring monitoring

·         Potentially analysing results

MySQL/PHP Profilers

·         Setting up New Relic/Ruxit

·         Analysing results (basic coding concept knowledge helpful here)

Some PCI compliance process knowledge and experience