System Admin

Roles & Responsibilities

What We Are Doing

Klopotek operates a managed hosting service for 400+ publishing customers across on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud environments. Operational procedures and deployment workflows are already encoded as Ansible runbooks. We are replacing the custom Java-based orchestration tool that currently runs those runbooks with Ansible Automation Platform (AWX), and adding CheckMK-based monitoring so that infrastructure events trigger automated remediation without human intervention.

The Ansible runbooks are the asset. The work is migration, integration, and standardisation — not building automation from scratch. The engineer we need must be able to take over existing runbooks, restructure them for AWX, and connect CheckMK alerting to automated responses across a mixed Windows and Linux environment.

This is not a cloud-native DevOps role. Kubernetes, Terraform, and AWS pipeline experience do not qualify a candidate for this position.

Required Skills — Non-Negotiable

All four areas below must be present.

1. Ansible — Hands-on Production Experience

• Has written and maintained Ansible playbooks and roles in a real production environment — not just lab or tutorial work
• Understands Ansible best practices: idempotency, role structure, variable scoping, inventory management, vault for secrets
• Can read an existing playbook written by someone else, understand what it does, and safely restructure it
• Has managed multi-OS Ansible inventories covering both Linux and Windows targets simultaneously

2. AWX (Ansible Automation Platform) — Orchestration

• Has deployed and operated AWX or Ansible Automation Platform as the runtime for production playbooks
• Understands AWX concepts: job templates, workflow templates, inventories, credentials, RBAC, execution environments
• Can migrate existing playbook invocations from a script or custom tool into AWX job templates
• Comfortable standing up an AWX instance pragmatically without a production Kubernetes cluster

3. Windows Server Administration

• Genuine Windows Server sysadmin experience — not just awareness of Windows as a concept
• PowerShell scripting to production quality: services, scheduled tasks, registry, Active Directory basics
• WinRM configuration for Ansible remote management of Windows targets
• Experience automating Windows Server tasks via Ansible (win_* modules, PowerShell exec from playbooks)
• Comfortable diagnosing Windows Server issues remotely: event logs, services, performance counters

4. Linux System Administration

• Production Linux admin experience: RHEL/Oracle Linux/Ubuntu — systemd, package management, networking, SELinux basics
• Bash scripting to production quality
• SSH-based remote management and troubleshooting
• Experience automating Linux server tasks via Ansible

5. CheckMK (or equivalent monitoring)

• Has configured and administered a CheckMK, Nagios, or Zabbix instance in a real environment
• Understands how to define custom checks, configure alerting thresholds, and manage agents across a server fleet
• Has experience connecting monitoring alerts to automated remediation via webhooks or event-driven tooling
• CheckMK experience is strongly preferred

What a Strong Candidate Looks Like

The ideal profile is a senior sysadmin who has automated their way out of repetitive work. They have years of hands-on experience on both Windows and Linux, they reached for Ansible because it made their job better, and they have run AWX because they needed to scale that automation across many machines. They know CheckMK or a comparable monitoring tool from operating it, not from reading about it.

They are pragmatic. When asked how they would stand up AWX for a new project, their answer involves getting something running first and evolving it — not designing a production architecture for six months before writing the first playbook.

• Seniority here means depth, not years. We are looking for someone who has done this in production and can work independently with minimal hand-holding.