Contract Systems Engineer and Administrator

Guidelight Technology Solutions — Remote Tags: DevOps • Remote 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 c