Linux System Administrator

Overview

Parklink Limited seeks a skilled, motivated candidate to fill the position of Linux System Administrator, who loves the challenges of high-availabilty SaaS and working with Linux on embedded systems.

Company Introduction
Parklink’s flagship product is Rebadge a patented RFID duplication device, used by locksmiths and security professionals world-wide. There are currently over 2000 devices online world-wide (Check out our coverage map).

The team currently consists of six staff: the founder; our CTO as Dev Lead; a Senior Fullstack Developer; an Electronic Engineer,;Administrative staff and a Technical Support staff.

The successful candidate would be the seventh member on the team.

The company structure is based in Hong Kong, but the team is concentrated in around Europe and fully remote.

We are a highly optimised / lean company. The successful candidate will have the ability to work autonomously on a constantly evolving infrastructure and rapidly expanding client base. You will work on a real product that is used by thousands of people daily.

Working for us means you’ll be able to flex your DevOps muscles automating server clusters and apply your Linux skills maintaining a custom Linux distro, and you’ll have a real impact on a real product that exists in the real-world, used by thousands of people every day. It’s an exciting possibility.

We are not another boring SaaS company.
We create, manufacture and deploy real hardware on a global scale, with back and front end code managing it all. You’ll have a chance to get your hands onto hardware integration, distributed software deployment and real time monitoring. If you’re driven, curious, and a hacker at heart, this position is for you.
We will provide you with all the training and tools you need, an annual travel budget, and a dynamic, fair and respectful work environment.
Reciprocatively, we are seeking to work with someone that is honest, skilled, self-motivated, and reliable.

Parklink’s Infrastructure

Parklink infrastructure has two key elements:

• Devices / Embedded Systems
• Server Architecture

Our Rebadge devices are RaspberryPi-based, with custom RFID hardware and backed by an optimised debian distro.
Deb packages and custom deb repositories are used to deploy and update client app into these fleet of devices.
Security, stability and reliability are key elements.

The hardware devices are supported by our Server Architecture, which provide the front and back-end services (REST API, Web Apps, etc).
We maintain independent staging and production clusters.
Server distro is CentOS, with nodes managed by Salt.
As with our hardware: security, stability and reliability are key elements.

Role
We are seeking a candidate with strong Linux experience that is willing to work on both Server Clusters and Embedded Hardware.

There are two main roles:

1.  Server Cluster Admin Consolidating/maintaining our server infrastructure
   (nginx/varnish/pound/memcached/redis/mariadb) currently handled through Salt
2. Embedded System Admin “Core” linux work
   Customized boot, custom kernel compiling, deb package builds, etc on the custom linux build that runs on embedded hardware

Tasks
Some example of the tasks you’ll be doing:

Web Cluster System administration

• Mantain/extend Salt recipes that defines our infrastructure
• Migration from CentOs to a different LTS distro
• Setup/maintain monitoring tools to report the health of our systems
• Setup/maintain integration jobs (i.e. Github actions for CI)
• Setup/tests failover strategies

Linux OS maintenance/customization

• Compile customized Kernels with custom modules
• Maintain the custom deb repo used to distribute our updates
• Integrate new hardware into the system
• Create debian packages for applications

Skills / Experience Requirements

Technical Skills

• Salt (Fluent)
  Ability to write and maintain salt recipes for a web servers cluster
• Bash (Fluent)
  Ability to write and maintain bash script to handle deployments, monitoring and general system level tasks
• Git/GitHub competency
  Fluent with Git, respecting & maintaining development procedures (issue branch, code review, pull request, merge, etc)
  Confidence in setting up Continuous Integration jobs through GH Actions
• High Traffic, High Availability Clusters
  Experience with distributed server clusters understanding the requirements of high-load environments
• Server monitoring
  Ability to setup and maintain monitoring and alerting tools across a server cluster
• Strong Linux Experience
  Intermediate configuration & administration tasks (SSH, Bash, etc)
  Core customization (custom bootloader, custom kernel build, custom module integration, etc)
  Raspbian Experience Bonus

Bonus Skills

• Deb Repositories maintenance experience
  Maintenance of Deb repositories / Knowledge of Repositories structure
• Hardware Familiarity
  Raspberry PI
  Serial / UART
• NFC Familiarity (Bonus)
  13.56 (Mifare, libNFC, etc)
  125KHz (T55, EM4XX etc)

Personal Skills

• English (Fluency in written + spoken)
• Ability to communicate clearly and efficiently
• Ability to work autonomously & self-motivate
• Ability to integrate into an existing team & structure

Time Requirements

• This is a full time, remote position (8 hours per day, 5 days per week)
• Reachable during work hours via phone / slack (~GMT+1)

Compesation

• 35 – 45k EURO per year (depending on experience and skills coverage)
• 2kEU Hardware Allowance / $2450 USD
• Annual Travel Allowance
• We will provide all training required
• We will provide all hardware necessary (Devices, parts, badges, etc)
• Flexible time off 25 Paid Vacation days + 11 Paid Public Holidays

Application Pre-requisites

• Your updated CV
• A brief email explaining who you are, why you fit the position, and how your experience is relevant.
• An overview of your side projects that you work on / contribute to (If applicable)

Applying

Click “Apply” or send an email to jobs@parklink.asia with all requisite documents.
We will take time to study each application with diligence – please take the time to read over the position requirements carefully.