SPINS Ventures, a subsidiary of SPINS, the premier retail data and intelligence company for natural and specialty products, is seeking a new, highly ambitious and tech-curious member to join our disruptive, data-driven digital ventures team. SPINS Ventures is comprised of several companies and proprietary SAAS solutions that utilize retail data in new ways to drive efficiencies and consumer engagement in some of the country’s largest and most influential food & beverage companies and retailers. This position will encourage experimentation and creativity with a focus of continuously seeking new ways to make Big Data more accessible to the industries we serve through high-performance, web and mobile applications that deliver more value, faster, and through the most intuitive suite of B2B and B2C applications.

  This position will require an appetite for exploration of new technologies, the ability to rapidly adapt between different environments, self-start and self-organize. The Senior Site Reliability Engineer reports to the Chief Technology Officer and will be based locally to SPINS Corporate Headquarters in the River North neighborhood of Chicago.  

  Responsibilities:

  • Understand that there are mission critical operations that may occasionally require systems support any time of day or night, on any day of the week, as necessary
  • Ideate, develop, enhance and maintain scripts to support and automate processes and operations
  • Investigate, identify and perform root cause analysis of system defects
  • Support, monitor, maintain, and improve the cloud-based compute environment, including web servers, data warehouses, storage, and other systems
  • Deploying, managing, and operating highly available, scalable, fault tolerant systems, including Linux and Windows machines, within the AWS environment
  • Analyzing and estimating AWS cloud usage and costs, identifying and implementing cost mitigation and control mechanisms
  • Ability to quickly find topical animated GIFs for our team amusement

Desired Skills and Experience

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or MIS or equivalent level of related experience
  • 5+ years’ experience as a system administrator or devops engineer highly desirable
  • 3 years of experience with Linux, Apache web server, and open source software (installation, configuration, modules and tuning) highly desirable
  • Bash shell scripting wizardry

  • Minimum 12 months hands-on experience with, or 24 months exposure to:

  • AWS implementation, infrastructure, capabilities and best practices
  • DevOps automation tools like Chef and Puppet
  • Provisioning, operating, and maintaining systems running on AWS
  • AWS networking paradigms, including VPCs
  • Docker and container best practices
  • Configuring monitoring, alerting and performance trace analysis with New Relic
  • Configuration of SSL certificates in AWS and ensuring secure network traffic are implemented throughout the environment
  • DBA experience with MySQL, including optimizing (query plan analysis and covering index strategies), normalization techniques and data modeling
  • Fundamental programming knowledge (PHP a plus)
  • Configuring and deploying CI strategies
  • Java application support (Maven, Tomcat)

  • Must be able to work in a team environment and work with developers Preferred Experience:

  • Hadoop, Spark, MapReduce, NoSQL, document databases, datamarts and data warehouses
  • Experience and demonstrable wizardry in command line tools, using pipes, redirection, awk, sed and the complete linux gnu tool chest
  • Understanding and experience in regular expressions
  • Thorough understanding of TCP/IP networking principles (OSI model), firewalls, load balancers, storage, monitoring, security) and have experience in translating these to the cloud