Senior Systems Architect
Apply NowCompany: InkBridge Networks
Location: Ottawa, ON K1A 0A5
Description:
We are looking for someone who enjoys building complex and mission-critical network ecosystems. Our company builds these systems for ISPs and other companies around the world for customers such as AT&T, Goldman Sachs, Vodafone, etc. Whether it is single site, multi-site, SQL, LDAP, RADIUS or DHCP, these systems have to work 24/7 without issues.
If you're the kind of person who takes pleasure in drawing from your depth and breadth of networking expertise to solve interesting customer problems every day, this could be the job for you. It involves the fun and interesting work of designing and deploying customer systems, without the mundane work of daily maintenance.
Your role would be to help design, build, and deploy custom network infrastructure for our customers. You'll be working on networks for ISPs and enterprises that need high performance and High Availability across multiple geographic sites, with millions of users.
Our ideal candidate has familiarity with scaling large network ecosystems which include fail-over provisioning, database clusters, load-balancing, and multi-site synchronization. Our engineers work directly with the customer, so good communication and "soft skills" are highly valued as well.
Although all of our customer projects incorporate our Open Source product, FreeRADIUS, familiarity with RADIUS is not a requirement for this position. In practice, the bulk of our work involves designing and building the ecosystem around RADIUS, while a minority of our time is spent working directly with RADIUS itself. We are looking for someone with strong attention to detail, who can deploy the entire network authentication ecosystem: databases, fail-over, replication, etc.
As a corporate culture, we place a high value on minimal bureaucracy, and on individual contributors pitching in for a variety of roles within the organization. We believe that "slow is fast, and fast is slow". The approach of "move fast and break things" simply doesn't work when entire countries depend on our product for Internet access.
Work location
Our preference is to fill this role in Ottawa, where our headquarters are based. However, we value expertise above all else, and are open to considering remote candidates for the right person. Currently, our team is based in Canada, USA, France, and the UK. We gather in person once or twice a year to meet each other IRL, hang out, eat good food, and lay out a plan for the following year.
About InkBridge Networks
InkBridge is a company of world class engineers. Though small, we regularly out-compete technology juggernauts who are more than hundred times our size.
We are the team that builds and maintains FreeRADIUS, an Open Source RADIUS server which also happens to be the world's most popular RADIUS server. Our product has more installations than all of our competitors combined - and our competitors include Microsoft, Cisco, and Nokia.
Our senior engineers are actively involved in standards bodies such as the IETF and are widely accepted as among the top world experts in RADIUS and adjacent technology.
We're not a "Move fast and break things" kind of company. Instead, our philosophy is "Be methodical, careful, and never, ever break things." Hundreds of millions of people around the globe depend on our software to access their networks, and we take that responsibility very seriously.
Requirements
Knowledge of version control (Git), automated deployment tools (such as Salt Stack or Ansible) and Infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform), are expected. Extensive experience in at least one modern programming language is highly desired. Experience with shell scripting in a Unix environment and automated testing is a must.
On the networking side, we won't ask you to describe a the packets in a TCP handshake, but you should know some of the common pitfalls of TCP connections traversing NAT gateways and firewalls.
Applicants will need to work within a team and demonstrate a willingness to take ownership of problems and follow through on solutions.
Applicant Requirements
Must have familiarity with the following technologies or a similar equivalent:
Knowledge of the following protocols and technologies is desirable:
Knowledge of FreeRADIUS is always beneficial, of course, but is not required. We find RADIUS to be the easy bit. We need people who can build suites of tools and networks of systems around FreeRADIUS.
If you're the kind of person who takes pleasure in drawing from your depth and breadth of networking expertise to solve interesting customer problems every day, this could be the job for you. It involves the fun and interesting work of designing and deploying customer systems, without the mundane work of daily maintenance.
Your role would be to help design, build, and deploy custom network infrastructure for our customers. You'll be working on networks for ISPs and enterprises that need high performance and High Availability across multiple geographic sites, with millions of users.
Our ideal candidate has familiarity with scaling large network ecosystems which include fail-over provisioning, database clusters, load-balancing, and multi-site synchronization. Our engineers work directly with the customer, so good communication and "soft skills" are highly valued as well.
Although all of our customer projects incorporate our Open Source product, FreeRADIUS, familiarity with RADIUS is not a requirement for this position. In practice, the bulk of our work involves designing and building the ecosystem around RADIUS, while a minority of our time is spent working directly with RADIUS itself. We are looking for someone with strong attention to detail, who can deploy the entire network authentication ecosystem: databases, fail-over, replication, etc.
As a corporate culture, we place a high value on minimal bureaucracy, and on individual contributors pitching in for a variety of roles within the organization. We believe that "slow is fast, and fast is slow". The approach of "move fast and break things" simply doesn't work when entire countries depend on our product for Internet access.
Work location
Our preference is to fill this role in Ottawa, where our headquarters are based. However, we value expertise above all else, and are open to considering remote candidates for the right person. Currently, our team is based in Canada, USA, France, and the UK. We gather in person once or twice a year to meet each other IRL, hang out, eat good food, and lay out a plan for the following year.
About InkBridge Networks
InkBridge is a company of world class engineers. Though small, we regularly out-compete technology juggernauts who are more than hundred times our size.
We are the team that builds and maintains FreeRADIUS, an Open Source RADIUS server which also happens to be the world's most popular RADIUS server. Our product has more installations than all of our competitors combined - and our competitors include Microsoft, Cisco, and Nokia.
Our senior engineers are actively involved in standards bodies such as the IETF and are widely accepted as among the top world experts in RADIUS and adjacent technology.
We're not a "Move fast and break things" kind of company. Instead, our philosophy is "Be methodical, careful, and never, ever break things." Hundreds of millions of people around the globe depend on our software to access their networks, and we take that responsibility very seriously.
Requirements
Knowledge of version control (Git), automated deployment tools (such as Salt Stack or Ansible) and Infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform), are expected. Extensive experience in at least one modern programming language is highly desired. Experience with shell scripting in a Unix environment and automated testing is a must.
On the networking side, we won't ask you to describe a the packets in a TCP handshake, but you should know some of the common pitfalls of TCP connections traversing NAT gateways and firewalls.
Applicants will need to work within a team and demonstrate a willingness to take ownership of problems and follow through on solutions.
Applicant Requirements
Must have familiarity with the following technologies or a similar equivalent:
- SaltStack.
- Terraform.
- vSphere or other virtualisation solutions (virtualbox, Docker, etc...).
- Git
- Python, Lua, or any modern programming language other than JavaScript.
- GitHub actions CI.
- General networking L2-L4
Knowledge of the following protocols and technologies is desirable:
- LDAP (Applicant should at least understand what scopes and filters are).
- SQL (mainly PostgreSQL and MySQL).
- Redis (or one of its clones).
- RADIUS.
- 802.1X, EAP, EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS, EAP-PEAP, EAP-SIM, EAP-AKA.
- IKEv2, IPSEC, Wire guard.
- X509 based PKI.
- Kafka
- DHCPv4, DHCPv6
- VRRP
- DNS
Knowledge of FreeRADIUS is always beneficial, of course, but is not required. We find RADIUS to be the easy bit. We need people who can build suites of tools and networks of systems around FreeRADIUS.