Systems Administrator

Job Brief:
Systems Administrator

Stranger Studios, LLC is a creative firm that builds open source technology and produces digital content to help people get paid. All of our software is free to use. All of our content is free to consume.

Stranger Studios builds products around the platforms we create, including support, automation, guidance, and enhanced content delivery. Businesses that use our platforms benefit from fast, secure software built specifically to help them make more money. Individuals and organizations use that money to find freedom in their lives and to achieve their respective goals.

We are looking for a Systems Administrator to take ownership of our hosting platform, the infrastructure that keeps our customers' membership sites online and running smoothly.

This is a hands‑on role. We need someone who does the work themselves: patches the servers, reads the logs, writes the runbook, fixes the thing. You will collaborate closely with a small team and work in the open, but the day‑to‑day health of the platform is yours.

If you’re worried about the title of Systems Administrator versus SRE or something else, this is probably not the right role for you. Titles and responsibilities are fluid around here. If that excites you, keep reading.

Our setup is atypical on purpose. We host one site per server, with no shared servers and no lock‑in, automate aggressively, and lean heavily on AI tools to help us build, maintain, and document our infrastructure.

An AI agent works alongside our team with real access to the platform: it monitors the fleet, investigates issues, and proposes changes. Part of this job is being the experienced human in that loop: reviewing its work, improving the runbooks it executes, and supplying the judgment it doesn’t have.

The right candidate finds that genuinely exciting: open to non‑standard approaches, fluent enough with modern AI tools to use them as a force multiplier, and grounded enough in Linux fundamentals to know when to override what an AI suggests.

• Fully remote team with diverse members in 5+ different countries.
• 35 hour work weeks.
• Flexible paid time off policy for full time team members, with a minimum of 25 paid days off per year.
• Competitive salaries.
• Stipends for healthcare and technology expenses.
• Join a team that cares about your growth and well‑being.

As our Systems Administrator, you will own the day‑to‑day health of our hosting platform. Customers trust us to keep their sites online; you will be the person making sure we live up to that trust.

Responsibilities include:

• Manage the Fleet: Oversee a growing fleet of Ubuntu Linux servers on Digital Ocean, one customer site per server, running the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and Word Press. This is fleet management, not server babysitting: golden images, repeatable provisioning, and fleet‑wide rollouts rather than hand‑tuning individual boxes. You keep track of the whole fleet, notice what doesn’t belong, and make careful improvements that keep it healthy over time.
• Maintenance and Updates: Keep our servers up to date with security patches, software updates, and best practices.
• Troubleshooting: Monitor, diagnose, and address traffic, performance, and security issues as they arise across the whole stack. When a site is broken in the browser but fine from the command line, you know to suspect the layers in between.
• Own the Weird Problems: Dig into code when needed and work effectively in non‑standard setups. If bad code is causing throttling on a server, you do not stop at "that’s a dev problem." You get as far as you can, ask good questions, and stay responsible for the issue while pulling in others…