Fight Aging!

For those of you who herd servers, sling code, and live the freelance life of many concurrent clients, I see that the SENS Foundation is looking for a part time IT resource:

SENS Foundation, a Californian non-profit, seeks an IT manager to work as part of its expanding team. The position is 2.5 days per week.

About SENS Foundation: SENS Foundation is a non-profit, life sciences organization with a mission to develop, promote and ensure widespread access to rejuvenation biotechnologies which comprehensively address the disabilities and diseases of aging. Our Research Center in Mountain View, California is the hub for a growing team of researchers, and outreach and executive staff. Several members of staff are located outside California, in the USA or Europe. In addition, we award grants to affiliated universities and research organizations.

About the position: The IT Manager will, in the first instance, report to our Director of Research Operations, Tanya Jones. However, the successful candidate will be required to work with all members of staff to consolidate and expand our IT infrastructure, both internal and public-facing. Initial projects will include: migration of email systems from legacy servers; implementation of a collaboration framework for files and documents; a review of our web systems, their integration with finance and customer relations back-ends, and associated social networking sites.

About the candidate: The successful candidate will have proven abilities in the technical aspects of the position, detailed below. He or she will also have experience with project planning, including gathering user requirements, performing software and hardware comparisons, creating functional specifications, implementation plans and costings, managing a budget, etc. The position requires an ability to understand the key business requirements at all levels of the organization, whilst demonstrating independent management skills at the IT project level.

This might actually be a good client relationship for a couple of people at 8-10 hours a week or less each - one web developer with a good understanding of Drupal and social media, and one IT-focused resource who lives and breathes mail servers and networking. It's rare to find one person in the 4-6 years of experience range who can both develop websites and manage the back end of servers and networks - and for some reason Drupal developers seem to be hard to find as well. I've always thought that to be strange, given the framework's popularity. If it's next to impossible to find Drupal developers to hire, who are the people building that huge developer ecosystem, posting to the forums, and erecting thousands of websites? One of life's little mysteries, I suppose.

In any case, I see the steady stream of help wanted ads emerging from the SENS Foundation to be another positive sign of progress. We want to see funds put to good use, and keeping the lamps lit and the servers running at the Foundation is a good use. So if you think you can help, contact the Foundation and make a pitch - I know this community has a fair number of more technical folk lurking in the wings.