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A day in the life - Jr. Systems Administrator

If we were you, we’d want to know a day in the life of a given job before we take the time to interview. So here it is.

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Our product, Cloud Retailer is mind-blowing tech for small to medium liquor stores.

We are about 30 employees. ~10 are in our Sartell office, the others are remote. Some in the US, some in Poland, India, and the Philippines. Altogether we have people from 7 different countries on our team. The people in these remote countries are NOT cheap labor. We are NOT a call center. The teams outside the US are talented and real people. They work hand in hand with our US teams every day. We see their faces – we know the names of their kids. We are an ethnically and geographically diverse group – and we love that. Though we don’t spend much time focusing on it since it’s second nature.

One place we lack diversity: our values. We celebrate underdogs, geekiness, hard work, and people who put their team first.

If you want to understand the types of people you’ll be working with, the history of the company, and what we’re trying to accomplish we invite you to go to our mission page. There you can see the case studies published by Microsoft on our work and the awards and milestones we’ve achieved.

Our objective in a nutshell is to be – unquestionably – the best computer systems for small to medium (1 to 50 locations) liquor stores. The aim is for people to say “You’re a liquor store? You’d be crazy not to use Cloud Retailer.”

Start of the day

The day begins at 8:30 AM CST, typically this is kicked off by reviewing our monitoring tools or emails for any new alerts or anomalies.

Within the first two hours of the day, you’ll have time to review any questions or expres any feedback during your morning checking with the Internal Support Team supervisor, our CTO, Ryan.

Thursday morning is our “Level 10” meeting. This is an opportunity for everyone on the team to raise issues and help resolve them.

The day

As a Jr. Sys Admin member of the Internal Services team, you split your attention between 3 possible types of work:

1. Assisting fellow team members with questions and issues related to internal operations and equipment.

We have some of the best team members anyone could ask for. Our job is to keep them focused and empowered by ensuring their needs are met to perform their best. This may take the shape of a question about system performance, adding a new internal user, provisioning new servers, and many more!

~40% of the workload

2. Facilitating routine system maintenance.

The most powerful, performant, and interesting systems in the world all require proactive upkeep in order to maintain satisfactory levels of performance. Likewise we also appreciate the art of keeping our systems up to date, and performing inspections to know, not assume, that everything is working as expected. Whenever possible we work to automate these tasks and incorporate them into our monitoring infrastructure.

~30% of the workload

3. Executing strategic company & department initiatives.

We’re a growing company – constantly evolving our processes and our product. When we do – you’ll very likely be a part of the group that came up with the idea and the people who will be executing the change. When you’re doing your job well, you get to put your fingerprints all over this company.

~30% of the workload

End of the day

The day ends at 5:30 PM. The last three tasks of the day are (1) double-checking that we’ve kept all the promises we made for today. If we told someone we would get back to them by end of day – then we make darn sure that happens. (2) cleaning up other loose ends, and (3), figuring out what the #1 thing we need to get done tomorrow.

Our customer: "Bob"

Bob is a liquor store owner and is the avatar we created for our ideal customer persona. He owns that nice store down the street with a huge selection of bourbon. His store does between $2M and $6 million dollars per year. Not too shabby.

Bob knows he needs technology but it’s not his favorite thing. If he can count on you, he is your best friend; if he perceives otherwise, he won’t pull any punches. If it doesn’t work – he’s losing profits, customers, and employees. He counts on his tech to watch costs, speed up checkout lines, and be easy for his staff. He won’t admit it (he thinks it would make him vulnerable) but the POS system is the lifeblood of his business.

It’s critical to his survival and when things go wrong it’s a huge deal. That said, if he can count on you, if he has confidence in you – he will treat you like a gem.

You will recognize that technology is only a hammer. A tool that helps you do your real job of creating HUMAN-based solutions for HUMANS.

Why are we talking about customers now? Because the customer is at the center of every good company. The fact that our clients are challenging (but worthy) is a huge opportunity. The team you are about to join has the level of talent to go further than ANYONE else in our industry. Find out more about why we mission page.