Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), a San Francisco and New York-based nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and defending public interest journalism, is looking for a full-time Associate Site Reliability Engineer to help us maintain our public-facing websites and internal systems and services.

In this role, you will empower the whole FPF team by participating in the development of a robust continuous deployment pipeline, by performing routine maintenance tasks, and by automating operations work, e.g., by using cluster and configuration management tools.

This position is open to recent college or university graduates, and to early-career and mid-career technologists whether or not you have a relevant degree. It is also open to candidates from non-technology career backgrounds with substantial applicable volunteer experience. We recognize the need to provide on-the-job mentoring and support to help you familiarize yourself with the technology stack we use.

This position is open to remote work within American time zones, or work in our New York or San Francisco offices.

Skills and Experience

Required:

• Comfortable using the Unix command line to do basic tasks (such as navigating directories, editing files, piping command output, etc.)
• Comfortable automating tasks and reviewing code in at least one shell or programming language commonly used in an SRE context (e.g., Python, Go, Bash, Ruby)
• Strong interest in honing skills required to empower a distributed software development and operations team through automation and systems maintenance

Preferred:

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, or equivalent work experience (e.g., work experience as a software developer or systems administrator)
• Experience remotely administering bare-metal or virtualized Linux servers
• Comfortable with open source configuration management and orchestration tools (especially Ansible, Molecule, Terraform)
• Experience building, using and deploying Docker container images

Great to have:

• Experience with monitoring, metrics and logging infrastructure (Icinga/Nagios, Logstash/Kibana, etc.)
• Experience deploying sites and services to cloud computing providers (e.g., AWS, GCE, DigitalOcean)
• Experience managing and deploying containers using Kubernetes
• Sysadmin certification, e.g., LFCS, RHCSA
• Experience contributing to free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects in any capacity

What you’ll be working on

Here are examples for the kinds of tasks the person in this role could be taking on in the first 6 months:

• Deploying website production code updates in collaboration with the web team
• Automating build and deployment pipelines so development teams can work more autonomously
• Increasing visibility of deploys through Slack notifications for Ansible playbook runs
• Executing transition of web services to containerized deployments, to minimize service interruptions and reduce manual involvement in code changes
• Auditing and updating secondary dependencies across our development and infrastructure stack (e.g., NodeJS dependencies used for frontend code and assets)
• Standardizing the developer environment across different sites like Secure the News, US Press Freedom Tracker, securedrop.org, freedom.press (e.g., consistent use of docker-compose, pipenv)
• Creating documentation and architecture diagrams for parts of our infrastructure (e.g., SecureDrop forum configuration)
• Creating custom monitoring/alerting tools, e.g., to monitor SSL certificate expiry
• Analyzing logs via Logstash/Kibana and debugging errors across the web application stack

Working with us

Freedom of the Press Foundation serves its mission through three key program areas. We create open source technology like SecureDrop, which more than 60 news organizations use to communicate securely with whistleblowers. We provide digital security training to journalists. We monitor and report on press freedom violations in the United States and around the world.

We achieve this with a staff of just 17 people. In this role, you would be working most closely with the existing core infrastructure team: our DevOps Engineer, Mike Sheinberg, and our CTO, Conor Schaefer. You would also work on developer environment changes and production deploys with Principal Web Developer Harris Lapiroff.

If you are passionate about starting or continuing your career in the field of Site Reliability Engineering with a mission-driven nonprofit, we encourage you to get in touch. And if you’re not quite ready to apply but want to know more about whether you might be a fit, please reach out to request a short informational phone call.

To apply, please send a short cover letter and your resume via email (see the original posting for the address) by November 4th, 2018. Please include links to your prior technical work where appropriate. The Freedom of the Press Foundation is an equal opportunity employer. Non-binary individuals, women, and minorities are strongly encouraged to apply.

Benefits of the job include a competitive nonprofit salary, health (United Healthcare Select Plus) and dental insurance, 20 days of personal time off, 13 paid holidays plus the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, 401(k) program with employer match, and commuter benefits. We are happy to answer any questions about these benefits. We value work-life balance, and we try to foster a kind, inclusive and collaborative culture.