Senior Systems Engineer

Join the revolution! Avalara Inc. for the summer, one of the fastest growing technology companies in the United States, is seeking one a Senior Systems Engineer.

Recently recognized by Inc. Magazine and other national publications, Avalara is the leader in web-based sales and use tax automation services and has experienced explosive growth since its inception in 2004. Based on Bainbridge Island, WA, and with offices across the U.S. and overseas, Avalara offers exciting opportunities in numerous fields.

Job Summary:
In support of the Avalara SaaS suite of services the Senior Systems Engineer will be a member of the team responsible for supporting the hardware and software infrastructure for all Avalara hosted data in a 24x7 SaaS environment where SLAs are very important and tracked closely. The Senior Systems Engineer will coordinate with Avalara business owners to ensure that the appropriate hosting objectives are being met. As the SaaS service offerings are located in co-location facilities, the Senior System Engineer will be the primary Avalara liaison with the co-location solution providers for all technical matters associated with operating the Avalara SaaS suite of services.

The Senior Systems Engineer is responsible for but not limited to: setup and daily maintenance of dedicated and pooled hosted environments, administration of all Windows and UNIX systems, administration of all components of the network and storage tiers, system design documentation and assessment of new technologies.

Job Duties:
• Tuning the operating systems and virtual machines for optimum performance.
• Reviewing existing processes and recommending changes or instituting new processes as necessary, including the areas of monitoring, upgrades, and tuning.
• Lead and participate in application customization discussions and technical implementations.
• Generate high-quality project documentation, such as architecture designs, implementation plans, design documents, test plans, etc.
• Provide documentation, training and technical escalation applicable for day-to-day administration and change requests for Web servers, Utility servers, Batch servers, Database servers and UNIX servers including the following:
o build/rebuild requests, event log monitoring and review, performance analysis, hardware performance monitoring (MOM, etc.), customer derived issues, purchase needs analysis, disk backup processing and domain management
• Support multiple services in the cloud: AWS, Azure, etc
• Research ROI factors and manage large scale projects related to hosted systems including application upgrades and data center changes/moves.
• Provide physical support and troubleshooting for the maintenance of switches and firewalls including cable management.
• Manage system components of vendor relations with hardware/software providers and 3rd party co-location/hosting providers.
• Document maintenance activities, failure analysis results, incident reports, penetration analysis, audit results and activities related to management of small-scale projects.
• Provide technical escalation and be on call via pager during designated periods.

Other Duties:
• The SSE will be expected to mentor junior team members as well as provide leadership on best practices and the development and maintenance of key processes.
• Working with engineering on release management and testing within a SaaS environment.
• Diagnosing, as appropriate, complex systems issues with multiple influencing factors which may require interaction with vendors to resolve problems.
• Leverage PowerShell to automate maintenance tasks where possible

Qualifications:
1. Experience designing, implementing, and maintaining system infrastructure components in a SaaS environment.
2. Experience running SaaS in a cloud environment (AWS, Azure, etc)
3. Deep expertise in Win2000/2003/2008 Servers and services like Active Directory/DNS/WLBS.
4. Expertise in MS SQL Server 2005/MS SQL Server 2008, including SQL Server operations, configuration and tuning, backup and recovery, transaction log management, cluster configuration, maintenance, performance tuning, indexes, and SQL query optimization.
5. Excellent Troubleshooting and Debugging skills for the Microsoft Platform (including IIS & SQL Server) & applications built on the Microsoft stack.
6. Excellent knowledge of VMWare ESX 3.5 and 4.0.
7. Ability to program in or have familiarity with at least one programming language (ASP/ASP.net/VB/VB.Net/C/C++/C#.NET/Java)
8. Deep knowledge of Networking and Hardware Standards, including TCP/IP, firewalls, switches, routers, V-LANs, NAS, SANS, DNS, Communications, Sockets, Active Directory, and load balancers.
9. Solid understanding of security concepts, principles and practices, including fundamental knowledge of OSI model.
10. Bachelor Science degree in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering, or equivalent years of work experience.
11. 7 – 10 years in a technically related field.

Avalara is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, age, gender, national orientation, disability, sexual orientation, US Veteran status, or any other factor protected by law.