Careers at Backstop

System Administrator

Join a growing team of passionate, self-motivated, talented, and creative people with big ideas about the future of software for the investment industry.  Backstop is a Chicago based company that makes web-based software applications for hedge funds and the people who invest in them.  Over the last few years, we have grown considerably, won several awards, and built a lot of great software.  Backstoppers take our customers and our service very seriously, but pride ourselves on not taking ourselves too seriously in the process.

What are we like? Our team consists of DBAs and sysadmins for the production environment.  We work hand in hand with the

development team and everyone does operations of their own code. We like to let the machines do the work for us whenever possible, so we rely heavily on automation of our tasks, both with Puppet and with home-grown software.  Backstop Solutions Group is looking for a System Administrator to help run our SaaS-for-Alternative-Asset-Managers empire. It's really an empire in the making; we need help to get there!

Core Responsibilities:

  • We're hiring someone to work mostly on our production and test infrastructure, though you'll be expected to help out in the office from time to time
  • Our sysadmins run the whole production stack, from cabling and running networking equipment to helping with application issues (Java on JBoss or Tomcat, some Rails)
  • While on-call, sysadmins are expected to be able to get out to our datacenter in the Chicago suburbs by car.  We've got a company Zipcar account if you need it
  • Once or twice a year you'll need to visit our datacenter in Texas as well as our other offices

Qualifications & Experience:

  • Experience with any CM system is great; preferably experience with Puppet
  • You don't need to be a Mac Master or Windows Wizard but at least knowing where to look for help on those is a must
  • We write tools to make our lives easier, so programming experience is required; ideally Perl, Python or Ruby
  • Knowledgeable in other technologies is a plus, but not required:
    • Cisco certifications
    • Oracle (especially in RAC or DataGuard configurations) not required, but preferable
    • NetApp filers
    • Configuration management tools (we <3 Puppet, but Chef, CFEngine and the like are welcome too)
    • virtualization (KVM is the tool du jour here, using Proxmox to manage it)
    • DevOps, security, programming in something other than /bin/sh
    • We're starting to do work in AWS, so any experience there is a bonus

Benefits:

  • Comprehensive pay and benefits package including medical, dental, vision, life & disability
  • Unlimited vacation time
  • 401(k) company match
  • Professional organization memberships
  • Intelligentsia coffee and espresso
  • Game room, team events and quarterly company parties
  • Weekly games, beer and snacks
  • Casual work environment, jeans encouraged (when not visiting clients)
  • Work with smart, cool and dedicated folks
  • The chance to work for a growing service provider in the alternative financial industry

Apply