Senior Linux Systems Engineer

About Us

For 20+ years, SalesAndCatering.com has built software that hospitality professionals rely on every day to run their sales and catering business. Our flagship product, STS Cloud, manages CRM, group bookings, contracts, BEOs, function diaries, and the entire sales workflow for properties ranging from select-service hotels to large conference venues. We're a 15-person, bootstrapped, profitable team. We're not chasing a fundraising round or racing to scale headcount. We've been remote-first since 2004, and after two decades of practice, we're genuinely good at it.

About This Role

Our infrastructure is currently owned by our engineers (including the CEO). We're hiring this role for two reasons, in this order:

1. We need a backup — someone who knows our systems well enough that production doesn't depend on the same handful of people being available.
2. We need a long-term owner — someone who'll take real pride in stewarding our infrastructure: keeping it healthy, secure, fast, and predictable as the business grows.

We're looking for an experienced Linux systems engineer who reads/writes Rails code comfortably, or has a desire to learn. The work is roughly 80% operations and 20% application contribution.

Our Stack

• Hosting: Bare-metal Linux servers at Rackspace
• Application: Ruby on Rails
• Database: MySQL
• Background jobs: Solid Queue
• File storage: AWS S3

What You'll Own

Reliability and uptime. Monitoring, alerting, incident response, and the operational discipline that makes "mystery outages" rare.

Security and hardening. OS patching, vulnerability management, TLS hygiene, firewalling, SSH access controls, secrets management, and pragmatic mitigation against common web threats.

Performance and capacity. Diagnosing bottlenecks across web, app, and DB layers. Planning and executing capacity upgrades with minimal downtime. Knowing when to scale up, scale out, or fix the code.

CI pipeline maintenance. Owning the health and reliability of our CI.

Rackspace partnership. Acting as our primary technical liaison with Rackspace for infrastructure projects, most of which are fairly bounded.

Rails contribution. Production-oriented Rails work: performance fixes, background job reliability, instrumentation, and small-to-medium operational features.

What Success Looks Like (First 90 Days)

• Our engineering team has stopped being the only people who know how production works.
• Production has clearer dashboards and alerts; debugging is faster.
• Patch, upgrade, and access processes are documented and consistent.
• The top three operational pain points have a plan; at least one is already fixed.

What This Role Is NOT

• Not a greenfield "let's rebuild on Kubernetes" role. We have a working system that deserves thoughtful stewardship, not a rewrite.
• Not a pure DevOps or SRE role focused on cloud-native tooling. We're bare-metal-at-Rackspace by choice.
• Not a 50%+ backend developer role. Rails contribution is real but operations come first.

You Should Apply If

• You have strong Linux systems administration experience running internet-facing production web apps. Uptime and security are your comfort zone.
• You've debugged real outages, read real logs, and worked the phones during an incident.
• You're comfortable with the fundamentals: networking (HTTP/TLS/DNS), process and resource analysis, basic security practices.
• You can write production-quality Ruby or Bash (or similar) to automate operations work.
• You've worked with relational databases in production — backups, slow queries, replication concepts, basic tuning.
• You can read Rails code, and writing it doesn't scare you.

Nice to Have

• Production Rails experience (deploying, tuning, debugging)
• MySQL 8 in multi-tenant environments
• AWS familiarity
• Experience working with managed hosting providers like Rackspace

How We Work

This is the part we're proudest of, so we're going to be specific.

We've been remote since 2004, and we've spent 21 years getting it right. Our team includes industry veterans who like the calm pace, parents managing school pickups, night owls who do their best work at 11pm, and people who'd rather take a Wednesday afternoon off and work Saturday morning. None of it matters to us. What matters is that the work gets done well, that you're reachable when you're working, and that we can count on you when production needs you.

What this means in practice:

• No mandatory meetings just to have meetings. We meet when we need to.
• Asynchronous-first communication. Slack, written updates, recorded walkthroughs.
• Trust by default. We don't measure butts-in-seats.
• You set your hours. With two exceptions: on-call coverage when things go wrong, and reasonable responsiveness during shared business hours with the teammates you work with most closely.

Logistics

• Location: Fully remote, US-based.
• On-call: As needed, but extremely rare.
• Compensation: $130,000–$150,000 base, depending on experience. We're also open to a 3-month contract-to-hire arrangement at $90–$110/hour if you (or we) prefer to validate fit before committing.
• Benefits: Medical, dental, and vision with meaningful company contribution; unlimited PTO; and the flexibility described above.