Technical Support Ninjas staff the front lines of our company - namely our 24/7/365 helpdesk and live chat. They're responsible for providing our customers with extraordinary customer service and support on a daily basis and ensuring that going above and beyond is just part of the job. In addition to technical prowess, our Technical Support Ninjas need to posses customer service skills that are way beyond average and also have an attitude and personality that makes them suited to work with people (our customers and their co-workers!) and make those people happy.

To attract the best talent and give our team members the most flexibility, A Small Orange lets its employees work from wherever they want, as long as they have a reliable, high speed Internet connection and can work reliably and be depended upon. At A Small Orange, personal and professional accountability is extremely important and starts with your work schedule and environment.

We have 3 standard shifts and what shift we are interviewing for will depend on our current staffing needs:

• Day (9:00am-5:30pm)
• Evening (5:00pm-1:30am)
• Graveyard (1:00am-9:30am)

All times listed are Eastern Time.

Please note we are a Linux Only Host. 

Basics: All of our Technical Support Ninjas need to:

• Must be customer-focused, and willing to do whatever it takes to resolve customer issues. Going above and beyond is the standard at A Small Orange.
• Excellent written English. Technical Support Ninjas currently primarily provide support over email, but may occasionally be asked to pitch in with live chat and phone support.
• Must be familiar (not an expert) with Apache, PHP, MySQL, Unix shell (bash), email (POP3/IMAP/SMTP), FTP, DNS and other standard web hosting applications and protocols.
• Must be able to work under pressure when bad stuff happens and get the job done.
• Multi-tasking is also a must. A Small Orange has a lot going on (including multiple brands).
• Must be able to ask customers for complete error message or derive the context of their problem if they provide insufficient information.

Bonus: If our Technical Support Ninjas know this stuff already, great. If not, they'll learn it in training and on the job:

• cPanel/WHM
• Knowledge of PHP, Python, Perl and/or Ruby on Rails, and FastCGI
• Familiar with subversion and/or other versioning software
• Can install PHP from source, enabling required modules. Also, can install a separate Python version that is separate from the operating system version.
• Iptables firewalls
• Common customer website apps, like Drupal, WordPress, MediaWiki, Magento, ZenCart, etc
• MySQL commands for support or troubleshooting, like importing/dumping a database, simple SELECT statements or "SHOW PROCESSLIST"

Extra Bonus: If our Technical Support Ninjas know this stuff, we are especially interested in their ninja-like technical skills and they should let us know that they:

• Can write PHP, Python, Perl and/or Ruby on Rails applications (we have internal projects going on if you can)
• Can write shell scripts to automate common system tasks.
• Can debug httpd processes using 300MB of resident memory each and trace it to the script that's causing the problems
• Can read mail headers to identify a source of spam
• Can identify an IP address slamming a comments.php script with POST requests and block that comment spammer
• Can convert a MyISAM database to InnoDB and explain under what conditions you would want to.
• Can build a custom RPM package for CentOS 5.x from a source code download for distribution to multiple servers.