We're Hiring a Systems Developer / Systems Administrator

April 27th, 2021

We're hiring a systems administrator / systems developer at The Calyx Institute! This role will become responsible for developing and maintaining parts of The Calyx Institute’s infrastructure. We are looking for someone to help modernize, update, and properly document these services and their setup as Calyx continues to grow. Our digital services include our instances of Jitsi, CalyxVPN (running on the Bitmask platform), Mumble, XMPP/Jabber, Mail, Tor servers and Onion services, our website, DNS, and mirror servers for partner organizations (such as the Tor Project).

The Calyx Institute is a not-for-profit education and research organization devoted to studying, testing, developing, and implementing privacy technology and tools to educate the public and promote free speech, free expression, civic engagement and privacy rights on the internet and in the mobile telephone industry. Calyx offers a range of tools and technologies for secure communications and censorship circumvention to users around the globe.

We think a successful candidate for this role would join us with the skills and experience to be able to:

Git: forking, branching, merging, reviewing, and rebasing. Ansible: writing ansible playbooks, deploying and maintaining servers using ansible, and troubleshooting problems.
Interest in containers: building and registering images, deploying containers, upgrading containers.
Use SSH: generating keys, validating host keys, installing authorized keys.
Ease and comfort using command line tools and shell scripts in a Linux environment.

Bonus points if you have experience with or an interest in:

Security planning: some previous exposure to information security basics, such as inventory management, upgrade and security patch management, and threat modeling.
Container orchestration: some previous exposure to any container orchestration system, such as Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, etc.
Debian: experience with Debian or another apt-based Linux distribution.
Networking: some previous exposure to topics in network administration, including network optimization, isolation, BGP routing, DDoS mitigation, and so on.
Working on other privacy, security, or censorship-circumvention technologies or projects.

We know that there are amazing candidates that won’t match the job description as we’ve written it. We don’t expect you to meet all of the above requirements. If you feel that you meet several of these requirements or could meet them with a little support, we would love to hear from you. At The Calyx Institute, we all wear many hats, but we don’t expect anyone to wear every hat.

In the coming year, we expect that you would be able to:

System Administration: manage Calyx Institute servers using best practices such as infrastructure-as-code, regular backups, failure recovery plans, timely updates and security patches, data minimization, and privilege isolation.
System Development: lead the design and automation of Calyx's public and private digital services, currently including CalyxOS build pipeline, voice conference, VPN, chat, email, DNS, Tor gateways, support tickets, and various web services.
Information Security: coordinate regular assessments of Calyx Institute's security profile, including practices for signing builds, maintaining keys, use of email, patch management, safeguarding data, and privilege assignment.

In the long term, we expect that you will be able to:

Help us to design and deploy the next generation of Calyx Institute infrastructure, including containerization, continuous integration, centralized logging, privacy-respecting analytics, threat detection, high availability, single-sign on, and scalable storage for CalyxOS user backups and data synchronization.

We think this role might be an especially good fit for someone who:

Wants to be engaged in our mission of educating the public about privacy and surveillance, and our work in providing privacy-by-design services and working support users who are disproportionately targeted by surveillance and censorship.

This is a full-time, salaried position located remotely within the United States or at our Brooklyn, NY office, beginning mid-June.

Salary and Benefits We are offering a salary of $75,000 - $100,000, commensurate with experience and qualifications. Calyx offers health, vision, and dental insurance, sick leave, three weeks vacation time, and holidays off.

How to Apply

Please send the following to jobs@calyxinstitute.org with a subject line that includes “Systems Developer / Systems Administrator”:

A cover letter in PDF format.
A 1-2 page resumé in PDF format.
2 professional references with contact information.

The Calyx Institute is an equal opportunity employer. Calyx encourages applications from all qualified individuals without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, marital status, citizenship, disability, veteran status and record of arrest or conviction.

We think a strong candidate will exhibit competencies in technical project management, clear communication, and trust building.

All interviews will be held remotely. We will respond to all applicants to inform them of whether we would like to schedule an interview. If you have not heard back from us within two weeks of your application, please reach out.

Candidates who are selected for a second-round interview will be asked to complete a questionnaire or short assessment exercise before the interview. This will take no more than two hours, and is intended to better understand how you might approach challenges similar to those you would find in this role. This will not include work that can be used in the real world, and is not a test, but rather is intended to help better inform the interview process.