Opportunity to work with a socially responsible, ethical, and dynamic business in the adult industry. We are seeking an experienced Sys Admin who enjoys the challenge of doing hard and interesting stuff, and maintaining mission critical infrastructure for a commercial business.

Working location: This is a 100% work-from-home / work-from-anywhere position.

Relevant timezone: Nominally, we are based in the Amsterdam UTC+1 timezone, but this role can be performed in any timezone, and our team is widely distributed (though EU-centric).

Employment basis: Contractor, paid an hourly rate. You track time and invoice us monthly. We always pay within 14 days.

Language: We are an English-speaking company. Fluent spoken and written English is required.

Employer: abbywinters.com BV (warning, nudity), a company incorporated in the Netherlands.

Recruiting: You’ll be dealing directly with the business Owner, existing Sys Admin and the Lead Developer in the recruiting process. No recruiters, agencies, or middle-management.

Us: We create and maintain web applications to support our ethical adult website business https://www.abbywinters.com (warning, nudity), running on our in-house software. Some web applications are customer-facing, some are for internal use only. We recruit models, make shoots, edit and release them. Customers are charged for access per month or per-scene using our in-house billing software. We’ve been running profitably for the last 21 years making human-friendly porn.

Infrastructure: All our infra is on AWS.Containerised. ~35 projects, a range of sizes, most strictly separated into Staging and Production environments.

Your colleagues: We select for passion and devotion to core skills. 28 people, men and women, professionals from all over the world. GLBTQI+ friendly. Dev team of six (including you).

Our development team’s approach: Agile development methodology with monthly sprints. Strong focus on unit tests and TDD, CI, design patterns and refactoring, and taking responsibility.

What it’s like here generally: Experienced, passionate, talented, and from diverse backgrounds. Shared desire to see the company and people in it succeed, while being socially responsible. Collegial environment of teaching, sharing, learning and developing skills. All people have a real, direct and daily influence on the direction and success of the company.

What it’s like here technically: AWS. Infrastructure as Code (Terraform). Docker ecosystem. Modern and legacy PHP ecosystems (most projects are PHP). Some Perl apps, and Javascript (Lambdas) scripting. Monthly accredited IT security training via https://www.hackedu.com (paid training for 6 hours a month).

The work environment for the Sys Admin: Casual, relaxed, constructive, engaging. When necessary, you’ll be in contact with the Product Owner, Developers, QA Tester and Lead Developer via Slack or similar collaboration tools. Trello used for Sys Admin Support tickets. Mostly, you’ll be left alone to maintain the infrastructure and solve Support cards as and when they come up. No scheduled meetings or virtual standups.

On-call component: The Sys Admin is on-call 24/7, but historically, there’s less than one “wake up” call per year and around 95% of the work has been done in business hours, the remaining work in “18/5” time. Relief periods are scheduled where the Sys Admin is not on-call, on a schedule we all agree to.

How deadlines work: We don’t do deadlines. We prefer open communication. For planned projects, people do research, make estimations in Story Points, and deliver roughly in that timeframe. However, issues raised for attendance by the Sys Admin are assigned a Business Urgency rating, which include expected “completed by” times.

What you’d be doing: Maintaining existing infrastructure. Creating new infrastructure. Extend functionality of existing infra. Reviewing logs. Improving security. Supporting others in the business for solving infra-related problems, and administering some access.

State of our code bases: Healthy, well-maintained, minimal technical debt, well-documented. Stored in Github (along with our Infrastructure-as-Code repository).

Your challenges: Performance implications of securely serving multiple ~5,000 page requests per-hour applications. We mainly use modern tech (with some legacy apps). Creating CI pipelines for existing projects. Reducing AWS costs. Improving customer experience.

Concerned about your rep after working in the adult industry?Don’t be. Previous technical staff have said this about finding new roles, after working with us:

• “…everyone considered it as an asset, and I agree with this. abbywinters.com is a challenging, high availability, high traffic environment”
• “abbywinters.com background is received very favourably”
• “It isn’t an issue… If anything, people are just surprised to learn that adult [companies] has its own development teams”
• “[prospective employers are] envious, and never negative”.

Your technical competencies: Advanced Linux system administration; Advanced knowledge of AWS: VPC, EC2, ECS, RDS, CloudFront, Lambda, Media processing and other common services; Advanced knowledge of Terraform; advanced knowledge of the Docker ecosystem; comfortable with modern and legacy PHP ecosystems, Perl (apps) and Javascript (Lambdas) scripting.

Required experience: Working daily as a Sys Admin with mission-critical applications in a commercial environment for at least five years, on a cloud service provider (eg, AWS, Azure, GCP or similar).

Handover / Training: All our infrastructure and associated documentation is in excellent condition and kept in a always-ready-for-handover state. The outgoing Sys Admin will provide a handover, and will be available for questions for the first month.

Favourable skills and experience: Extensive AWS and Terraform experience.

Remuneration: €75 Per hour. Historically, the Sys Admin has worked around 20 hours a week (86 hours a month), but that can vary depending on projects and issues. We expect 20 hours week to be the average for the foreseeable future.

Before applying: Read our application guidelines and requirements at https://careers.abbywinters.com, and check the free areas of abbywinters.com to make sure you’re comfortable with the material we produce. See how we introduce ourselves to prospective models at https://www.femalephotofun.com, and how we work with our existing models at https://models.abbywinters.com.

Interview and qualification process: Initially selected candidates will attend a 10-minute phone screening call to check technical compatibility. Subsequent interviews will be with the Owner of the company and separately the Lead Developer and Sys Admin by video chat. Promising candidates will be offered a paid ~6 hour (at €75/hour) assignment to demonstrate their skills and approach.

To recruiters: If you’re willing to do a 5% deal with a six month guarantee, we can talk. Otherwise, please do not message us.

To web services / IT companies: We’re seeking relationships with an individual Sys Admin, not a company that provides services. If you’re a one-person company, please apply. Otherwise, please do not message us about this opening.

Be sure to mention the word SPELLBIND when applying to show you read the job post completely. This is a beta feature to avoid spam applicants. Companies can search these words to find applicants that read this and see they’re human.

Salary and compensation

$70,000 — $90,000/year