Endless OS Foundation | Support Engineer & Community Coordinator
Click here to apply
Location:
- Remote work from UK, Germany, USA, Canada, Taiwan, Mexico, Kenya or other locations considered
- Office-based in London, Taipei, San Francisco, or Nairobi
Reports to: Director of Deployment (based in Taipei)
Our vision is simple: the whole world, empowered.
The Endless OS Foundation exists to democratize access to technology to create opportunity for underserved and under resourced populations around the world. We promote coding, education, livelihood, and digital agency for the public, particularly the youth and less advantaged around the world.
We provide a fully-featured, reliable and easy to use Linux-based personal computer OS which provides a rich and varied experience whether or not you have access to the Internet, and allows parents and educators to keep children safe from online threats by providing simple Internet access control. Apps bundled with the OS serve as the channels for content delivery, bringing content and games to support digital literacy, learning to code, language learning, creativity and STEM education. Endless OS ships in dozens of countries and on millions of computers through commercial and philanthropic deployments, bringing the mission of Endless OS to users around the world.
We currently target three specific initiatives for impact:
- Access: to increase the availability, affordability and reach of PCs and technology to youth everywhere, but in particular, in areas of low or no internet connectivity.
- Utility: to create tools that are usable by all people and make content localized to areas around the world or unique settings like emerging markets, rural communities, inner cities and prisons.
- Agency: to enable safe, autonomous learning for kids and learners to learn coding and other employable digital creativity skills.
The Foundation is a “remote-first” team of highly-skilled philanthropy and product specialists around the globe. We offer flexible working hours and locations as a matter of course. We are a friendly, mission-driven organization with a highly-engaged workforce and “can do” culture. Our team pulls together to solve big problems and drive towards our social impact goals.
Our Ideal Support Engineer & Community Coordinator
We are looking for a skilled Linux expert to evolve the backbone of our technical support offered to our community and deployment partners, and advance the growth and efficacy of the Endless OS online user community.
With our recent transition to becoming a non-profit foundation, we are looking to shift our technical support efforts for Endless OS download users to our community forums. We need you to find ways for those users to get a useful degree of support, both through stepping in yourself with appropriate technical solutions, and also fostering a community of users that help each other out.
In order to deliver on our mission of improving education, livelihood and digital agency, special editions of Endless OS are also licensed out to partners in school systems, detention centers, indigenous communities, etc. You will also help us attend to support tickets raised by those partners, and help us build a product that provides greater impact to such users.
You need to be nimble, confident and knowledgeable when driving the Linux desktop. If you don’t know where to start dealing with a specific technical support request, our product engineering team may give you a suggestion such as “that could be done with podman”, but they will not hold your hand through the process. So if you’ve never used podman before, without further instruction you’d quickly be off reading the podman documentation, opening the terminal and experimenting with it locally, and then perhaps following up with some precise technical questions to our product engineering team to further guide you to finding a solution.
You also need to have a feel for what drives the strength of online communities, hold a passion for helping people, and to be professional and courteous in your communication.
Professional growth opportunities include pathways to becoming involved in Endless OS software development.
Primary Responsibilities
- Provide technical support to users on our community forums
- Provide technical support to our impact deployment partners
- Develop and issue technical procedures for diagnostics and solutions in response to software problems reported by our users
- Develop and improve our technical product documentation
- Foster a user community that allows and encourages community members to become active, valued and functional members of the Endless OS ecosystem.
- Foster any community-driven grassroots Endless OS deployment projects in educational environments.
Required Skills and Experience
- Considerable experience with Linux-based operating systems.
- Must be comfortable working with the command line
- Experience providing technical support to users
- Experience working with bug tracking tools (Phabricator, Jira, Bugzilla, etc)
- Strong problem solving, communication, and prioritization skills
- An enthusiastic, independent, proactive, flexible, and cooperative approach to getting your work done
- Friendly and patient manner
- Motivated by open source software ideals and the power of community
Preferred Skills and Experience
- A Bachelor’s degree or higher in related field, or equivalent work experience
- Experience with Bash shell scripting and Python
- Familiarity with online and social media engagement
Endless is an Equal Opportunity Employer
Endless provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.