Job Summary

Square Panda is seeking a System Engineer in our Beijing, China office who will work with the internal Square Panda team (engineering, product, educational curriculum) and external engineering teams to develop, and extend our cloud-based services. Square Panda’s Educational Cloud Platform delivers critical functionality to our innovative educational technology products.  In particular, we are seeking someone with an Operational background to provide guidance on aspects of a feature's development that extend to how it interacts with the operating system and intermediate networks.  

The primary duties of the System Engineer will include collaborating with other members of the multi-national engineering team to strengthen exisiting features and develop new features of the Square Panda Educational Cloud Platform.  This role will provide input on the design and feasibility of various solutions and participate in development by deploying parts of the solutions, including implementing monitoring.  Additional duties will include developing internal tools, technical research projects, supporting partners and internal stakeholders and other duties as required.  

The successful candidate will be strongly versed in operational procedures and practices.  Previous experience with a shipping, consumer product (expected to run 24x7) is a big plus.  The Square Panda team is fun-loving, quirky, and full of self-starters.  We are looking for someone who values working independently but with the support of a skilled and diverse group of individuals.  You should be motivated, can figure out what to do next when there is down-time, and want to have an impact on the world.

This position reports to the Director of Software Engineering, with important relationships to the the Product Team.

Responsibilities

• Participate in the design and implementation of various Square Panda product features - particularly the aspects of a feature that interact with system and various network functions and protocols
• Deploy parts of the solution to our cloud-based servers
• Write code/scripts to aid in monitoring and automation
• Debug issues and implement solutions
• Define and execute operational practices and procedures
• Improve and extend product documentation
• Work collaboratively with other arms of the engineering team that are co-located in other countries

Minimum Qualifications

• Fluent in English, both written and verbal - must be able to communicate with engineers in other countries
• Proficiency in a scripting language such as shell, Python, PHP, Perl, etc
• Experience in many of the following technologies and protocols:
  • *NIX operating systems
  • General monitoring of servers and critical applications that run on the servers
  • TCP and monitoring connections in/out of the server and applications
  • cron
  • SMTP
  • SNMP
  • DNS
  • Hosting servers and services in Aliyun
  • Knowledge of various services offered by Aliyun
  • Load Balancers
  • VPCs
  • Routers/Switches
  • VPN
  • Firewalls
  • virtualization solutions
  • high-availability solutions
  • storage/disk encryption
  • network connection encryption (HTTPS, SSH, SSL)
  • log archival
  • databases (both relational and NoSQL)
  • knowledge of some common web applications such as Apache, Nginx, Tomcat
• Strong software development skills such as:
  
  • experience with a source control system
  • experience with an issue tracking system
  • experience with the design and development life-cycle
  • knowledge of debugging and problem solving methodology, particularly as reported against Production software
• Excellent communication skills
• Willingness to document work in a wiki and track work through an issue tracking system
• 5+ years of operations and/or system engineering experience
• BS in Computer Science or a related field and relevant experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Have worked on shipping product
• Additional skills that add value to our company (technical or domain)
• A passion for our product space and a desire to improve the lives of others