Part-Time Contract Systems Engineer and Administrator

Engagement Type

Part-time contractor for ongoing infrastructure engineering and operational support. Servicing a variety of nonprofit ministry and business clients, and an internal micro-SaaS product.

Hours and Availability

October–December 2026: Estimated 5–20 hours per week, including onboarding, environment assessment, and prioritized improvements.
Ongoing: Estimated 5–10 hours per week for maintenance, technical escalations, and planned improvements.
These ranges are estimates, not guaranteed hours. Work will be prioritized with Guidelight leadership within the agreed hours.
Your agreed working schedule must provide at least four hours of overlap with normal Eastern Time business hours.
Planned maintenance typically occurs around 5:00 a.m. Eastern Time. Maintenance windows are flexible and can be arranged around contractor and client needs.
Availability is required for agreed maintenance windows, which may fall outside normal business hours.
Other team members or client IT provide primary on-call coverage. Urgent technical escalations require a response outside agreed working hours when your expertise is needed. These have been infrequent: approximately two in the past year.
Additional hours for major upgrades, incidents, or release cycles can be approved with prior notice.

Overview

Guidelight Technology Solutions seeks a pragmatic, reliable Systems Engineer and Administrator to help design, maintain, and improve cloud and hybrid environments supporting client applications and our own micro-SaaS product.

You will work across three product and client environments, including AWS EC2 infrastructure and client-hosted Ubuntu systems. The work combines infrastructure design with hands-on operations: improving reliability and recoverability, maintaining servers and automation, supporting deployments, and implementing safe infrastructure changes.

You will collaborate with two full-time developers, Guidelight leadership, and client IT stakeholders. We are looking for someone who can assess an environment, explain practical tradeoffs, recommend improvements, and carry approved work through implementation and documentation.

Guidelight’s owner remains the primary contact for customer requests and handles initial triage and prioritization. You will own assigned infrastructure work and technical escalations, coordinating directly with developers, client IT, and end users when needed to resolve those assignments.

Client work includes Pro-Life and other Christian nonprofits.

Responsibilities

1. Infrastructure Design and Improvement

Assess existing environments and identify reliability, security, recovery, maintainability, and cost improvements.
Design and maintain highly available AWS EC2 environments.
Document proposed changes, practical tradeoffs, implementation plans, and recovery or rollback approaches.
Review recommendations with Guidelight leadership and implement approved designs.
Maintain a prioritized improvement backlog alongside routine operational work.

2. Linux Systems Administration

Administer Ubuntu Linux servers across staging, production, and other environments.
Perform OS patching, security updates, package upgrades, and planned maintenance.
Maintain container runtimes and supporting infrastructure services.
Apply configuration changes to meet client security policies.
Maintain baseline hardening, access controls, SSH hygiene, and environment separation.

3. Operational Reliability and Monitoring

Maintain and improve monitoring using AWS tooling and existing Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana stacks.
Tune dashboards and alerts so they are meaningful, actionable, and routed to the appropriate responders.
Expand monitoring coverage as services and deployment patterns change.
Investigate service failures, performance issues, and infrastructure anomalies.
Handle assigned technical escalations, involving developers or client IT as appropriate.
Develop and maintain runbooks and operational documentation.

4. Backups and Recovery

Manage application-level backups, including PostgreSQL backups and backup automation.
Monitor backup completion and investigate failures.
Verify recoverability through planned restore drills.
Document recovery procedures and dependencies.
Coordinate with client IT on system-level backups and snapshots where those are client-owned.
Identify gaps between application backups and system-level recovery arrangements.

5. Release Support and Deployment Operations

Support frequent application releases in collaboration with developers.
Build and maintain GitHub Actions workflows and deployment automation.
Maintain staging-to-production release promotion processes.
Implement deployment health checks, smoke tests, and rollback procedures.
Maintain Docker images, Compose services, runtime configuration, and environment consistency.
Own infrastructure and runtime upgrades, validating changes in staging before production deployment.
Coordinate changes that affect application compatibility with developers, who own application code, code-library upgrades, and functional testing.

6. Infrastructure as Code and Configuration Management

Maintain AWS infrastructure through Terraform, including EC2, security groups, IAM, S3, and networking configuration.
Follow safe Terraform practices for planning, review, state management, and applying changes.
Maintain and extend an established Ansible repository.
Keep playbooks idempotent, readable, and aware of environment differences.
Use automation to make infrastructure changes repeatable and auditable.

7. Limited Windows Infrastructure Support

Provide basic Windows administration and troubleshooting for endpoints supporting Microsoft Access applications.
Coordinate endpoint and access issues with client IT.
Support the infrastructure on which legacy PowerShell ETL scripts run, including permissions, scheduled tasks, connectivity, and execution environments.
Collaborate with Guidelight developers, who own the PowerShell scripts and application logic.

Required Skills and Qualifications

Strong production experience administering Ubuntu Linux.
Production experience managing AWS EC2 infrastructure.
Ability to design and maintain highly available environments and explain failure modes and recovery approaches.
Strong operational fundamentals: patching, troubleshooting, log analysis, incident investigation, and safe change management.
Production Docker operations experience.
Practical Terraform on AWS experience.
Ansible proficiency for system configuration and deployment automation.
Experience building or maintaining CI/CD workflows using GitHub Actions or similar tooling.
PostgreSQL operations experience, including backups, restores, upgrade planning, and basic performance troubleshooting.
Monitoring experience with CloudWatch, Telegraf/InfluxDB/Grafana, or comparable tools.
One to two years of basic Windows administration or helpdesk experience.
Sound security practices, including least privilege, secret handling, access management, and environment separation.
Strong written communication and the ability to maintain clear tickets, change records, and runbooks.
Ability to collaborate with technical and nontechnical stakeholders and work independently on agreed priorities.

Nice to Have

Experience with OpenTelemetry.
Experience operating data and analytics platforms such as Dagster, Superset, and Python API services.
Familiarity with Microsoft Access environments and troubleshooting PowerShell execution.
Experience improving release processes, deployment pipelines, and automated validation gates.
CompTIA Network+, Linux+, or comparable credentials.

What Success Looks Like

During the initial engagement, you will develop a working understanding of the environments, document significant operational gaps, and agree on a prioritized improvement backlog with Guidelight leadership.

Over time:

Managed systems follow documented maintenance and patching routines.
Critical services have actionable monitoring and an identified response owner.
Backup failures are detected, and agreed restore drills are completed and documented.
Releases use appropriate validation and rollback procedures.
Infrastructure changes are reviewed, repeatable, and auditable.
Runbooks enable other team members to respond effectively.
Infrastructure recommendations balance reliability, security, cost, and the available maintenance budget.
Assigned work is completed with clear communication about progress, blockers, and decisions needed.

About Guidelight

At Guidelight Technology Solutions, we value humility, integrity, and competence. We support nonprofits and businesses that depend on reliable systems and thoughtful technical stewardship.

Our work requires discretion, respect for client confidentiality, and a high level of professional ethics. We value people who communicate clearly, exercise sound judgment, and take responsibility for their work.

Guidelight Technology Solutions

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