Senior IT/Infrastructure Engineer

Position Description

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting, defending, and empowering public-interest journalism, is hiring a full-time senior IT/infrastructure engineer to help us maintain and improve our technical infrastructure.

We’re a 35-40 person organization, with about half working out of our office in New York City, and the other half working remotely. Infrastructure is a five-person team in the engineering department responsible for IT infrastructure (e.g., the office network), asset management, help desk support, on-site bare metal infrastructure, org-wide services, continuous delivery for websites (Freedom.Press, PressFreedomTracker.US), container-based CI/CD systems for engineering projects (SecureDrop, Dangerzone), intrusion monitoring and detection, incident response, and internal audits.

As a senior IT/infrastructure engineer, you will work closely with our staff, in-person and remote, to troubleshoot and resolve technical issues, as well as help plan and implement infrastructure upgrades.

This is a full-time position based in our Brooklyn office (with flexibility around work-from-home days). Applicants must be based in the New York City area or willing to relocate.

Responsibilities

IT & New York office infrastructure

• Provide hands-on support and troubleshooting for a mixed Mac/Linux environment, addressing end-user issues and troubleshooting technical problems as needed
• Procure hardware for staff and office
• Provide asset management; ensure assets are accounted for, maintained, upgraded, and disposed of/recycled when the time comes
• Lead the IT portion of personnel onboarding and offboarding processes
• Maintain and manage network infrastructure within the New York office, ensuring optimal performance, security, and availability
• Maintain bare-metal testing systems for the developers of SecureDrop and bare-metal build and release infrastructure for the developers of Dangerzone
• Contribute to IT policy decisions
• Contribute to establishing and maintaining vendor relationships for tech services
• Proactively share security and usability tips and recommendations for in-office and remote work

General systems maintenance

• Upgrade services and base operating systems
• Manage credentials and secrets
• Monitor system performance and security logs, identify incidents, access severity level, and respond according to our incident response protocol
• Customize monitoring and alerting tools, as needed
• Other responsibilities as assigned by the engineering manager

Note: Because of the nature of our work, we tend to place higher emphasis on security in all these tasks than most organizations. You’ll find us using encryption, hardened kernels, enforced 2FA, and similar security measures in many parts of the infrastructure. Our team also has a culture of multidisciplinary collaboration and chipping in when needed.

Qualifications

Must Have

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, related field, or comparable job experience 
• Minimum five years of experience in IT support, systems administration, or a similar role
• Strong working knowledge of Mac and Linux operating systems, networking protocols, and hardware
• Familiarity with access management, user authentication, and authorization processes
• Provide end-to-end physical implementation of network and bare-metal server infrastructure
• Excellent problem-solving and critical-thinking skills
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts to nontechnical audiences
• Ability to prioritize tasks and work independently, as well as collaboratively within a team
• Must be based in New York City area or willing to relocate

• Familiarity with cloud-based services and infrastructure
• Familiarity with asset tracking platforms (e.g., GLPI)

Preferred

• Familiarity with security auditing/review or implementing security controls based on standards and best practices
• Experience contributing to free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects in any capacity
• Experience with AWS, GCE, DigitalOcean, Icinga, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Ansible, Molecule, Terraform/OpenTofu, Debian, Fedora, Bash, and Python. Knowledge of other tools, including PostgreSQL databases, Nextcloud, package management (deb, rpm), and Redmine is not required but is a bonus.
• Experience with GPG

Working with us

This is a full-time role with a competitive nonprofit salary in the range of $105,000-$130,000, depending on experience. This position will preferably be based in FPF’s Brooklyn headquarters, with the flexibility to work from home on select days. For more information on our full benefits package, please visit our website’s careers page. 

FPF does not discriminate on the basis of an individual’s sex, age, race, color, creed, national origin, alienage, religion, marital status, pregnancy, sexual or reproductive health decisions, sexual orientation or affectional preference, gender identity and expression, disability, genetic trait or predisposition, carrier status, citizenship, veteran or military status and other personal characteristics protected by law.