I am the Director of IT at Beatport, and today I asked a Denver data center if they had a night or weekend NOC position.
I have family obligations creating a heavy financial burden. I need a second position. I am willing to work for a reasonable rate relative to my experience because the important thing is keeping myself and the people I love afloat during a difficult period.
I explained that directly and said I was ready to do the work.
I wrote to two people at Data393 whom I had met several times over the previous two years while evaluating managed services and colocation for Beatport. Their offering had not fit Beatport's needs, but I respected the facility and the technical people I met there. I asked them to send my resume to the right team.
The job I described myself for was hands-on. Linux administration, systems, networking, storage, databases, web stacks, and operational services. NOC and colocation work. Nights and weekends.
I joined Beatport as a senior systems administrator in 2006 and was promoted to lead technology in early 2007. I spend more time now on architecture, growth, management, budgets, and the systems behind a larger company. I can still troubleshoot a server at night.
Actually, the side work this fall has been very specific.
For one client I rebuilt two virtual machines running Linux Virtual Server on CentOS 5.2, including clustering and failover. I rebuilt web-server instances so they could replace older machines having intermittent session problems. I fixed PTR and reverse-DNS records. I put in a VPN path for remote maintenance because the existing load-balancer box sat in front of too much of the network, which meant losing that one machine could also take away the route needed to repair it.
The box was doing too much: DNS, Snort, LVS, iptables, and heartbeat. A few weeks ago, the sites went down and the colocation facility had to power-cycle it. The longer plan was a new firewall, two hardware load balancers, rebuilt web servers, a highly available file and backup system, and out-of-band management so a failed service did not also block the repair path.
The consulting work gave me a current example of the hands-on operations work I was offering to do.
The Data393 team already knew me through Beatport. Over the previous two years I had evaluated their managed services and colocation offering several times. We did not select it for Beatport, but I had seen the facility and met the technical staff. I was not sending a completely cold application. I was asking people who had seen me in a customer role to consider me for their operations team.
The shift would also put me back inside a network operations center. I could watch systems, handle tickets, respond to alerts, work on Linux and network problems, and help customers in the facility. Those were tasks I had done earlier in my career and still did during incidents at Beatport.
I am also tired. A full-time director job, existing consulting work, and another night shift will be a difficult schedule. I am considering it because of a real family obligation, not because I want to prove how much work I can take on.
In the email I called myself highly skilled, said I was motivated, offered to work at a lower rate than my experience might normally command, wished them happy holidays, and attached the resume. I needed a second position and asked directly.
I do not know if they have a position. I do know the systems. I know what a NOC shift requires. I know how to trace a failure across the network, storage, database, and web layers, and I know when the problem is that one box has accumulated five jobs nobody ever separated.
I do not know whether Data393 has an opening. If they call, I will have to fit the shifts around Beatport and finish the consulting rebuild already in progress. That is the plan for now: keep the main job moving, find the second position, and meet the family obligations that made me send the email.