ISC is Hiring

ISC is hiring another technical support engineer!

The technical support team is the heart of ISC: the revenues from technical support services are what fund ISC’s operations. Our support customers also are frequently the ones who alert us to subtle, hard-to-find software problems, and work with us to resolve them - for the benefit of all users.

The team right now includes six people, two of them part-time. We need someone who can work US business hours, and take turns being on-call during off-hours, to help us maintain our worldwide coverage. We don’t care where you live, as long as you have excellent, reliable Internet access.

We are a very friendly and fun group, with flexible policies and generous benefits. We all work 100% remotely, and usually get together once or twice a year in person in some cool place.

How can I know if I could do the job?

Our support engineers have nearly all been successful systems administrators in the past, most for several networks of increasing size and complexity. Our most senior support engineer, however, has a background in technical support, so that obviously works too. The people who like this job, and do it well, seem to be either motivated by their interest in solving problems, or by a desire to help people. Or both!

Obviously, successful applicants need to have a very broad grasp of networking fundamentals, know the differences between e.g. TCP and UDP, have fairly good Linux/Unix-foo, have extensive experience with either DNS or DHCP in particular, and be good at describing solutions to customers in English. We are very flexible about educational background and past experience in hiring, but we care a lot about the applicant’s responses to our technical screening questions. We also would love to see any examples you can share of presentations, papers, or anything else like that where you are explaining something technical.

How can I tell if I would like this?

The people we have hired for this position in the past have stayed with us for many years, which is some evidence that they enjoyed the work. Some of them even leave and come back again!

This is not a phone-bank kind of support job: you will probably not handle more than one or two cases a day, most of your communication will be via email, and you will have time to do some testing and research to help the user. Our support customers are generally very well qualified and experienced sysadmins themselves, and when they need help, there is usually a subtle problem lurking in the configuration or there is a bug. Sometimes, they are trying to do something that our software just doesn’t do, in which case it will be time for you to turn on the charm and convince software engineering to enable that.

In between handling customer issues, you will have time to write technical articles, read and respond to users on our public mailing lists, test new software versions and generally keep your skills up. We have a very active internal chat network, and you will have regular meetings with the software developers to discuss the trickier support issues.

I’d like to apply!

If this sounds like it might be fun, we encourage you to apply. We generally interview everyone who makes a reasonably good showing on the screening questions. Seriously, don’t skip those.

The current list of jobs available at ISC is always here.