Linux/OpenWRT System Engineer

Hybrid: From home and our office at Amsterdam Central Station

Salary: Between 50.000 to 64.000 EUR (including allowances plus excellent secondary benefits - see below)

Full-time: 37.5 hours per week (working part-time is also possible) 

IMPORTANT: You should be living in the Netherlands 

As our new Systems Engineer, you’ll be working on the firmware development of RIPE Atlas probes as a member of our RIPE Atlas development team - a pretty unique task! Do you have experience in this area, and are you eager to learn and share knowledge with a highly collaborative, multinational team? Then the RIPE NCC is the place for you!

RIPE Atlas is a collaborative, active Internet measurement platform built and operated by the RIPE NCC. It relies on about 14,000 vantage points (which we call probes) that are hosted by volunteers spread all across the globe measuring the network and sharing their findings. These measurements include DNS queries, traceroutes, pings, NTP, HTTP and other data.

The firmware of these probes is written mainly in C (with an appropriate level of scripting thrown in) and is available as open source. It is built using tools such as libevent and BusyBox. It runs mostly on OpenWRT or Oracle Linux, but it is available as packages for RHEL, Debian and other OSes as well. As of today, the majority of our probes run on small, dedicated hardware devices, while the rest run as software packages. The security and stability of the firmware code running on these devices are essential to the system.

🧠 In this role, you will:

• Manage the maintenance and release process of the RIPE Atlas probe firmware and software package for various Linux-based operating systems

• Maintain and enhance the firmware, for example by working on new types of measurements or new features of existing ones

• Make sure that the firmware code is safe and sound

• Explore the use of potential new hardware devices to run the firmware on

• Depending on experience: be involved in, or collaborate with the infrastructure operators, and back-end developers (and perhaps support the front-end work too!) using your ideas, skills and code

• Be involved in design- and architecture decisions for the future of the codebase.