Support Operations Technician (L1/L2), Infrastructure Hosting

Schedule: Shift-based, weekday-weighted with some weekend rotation.

Compensation: USD $1,000–$2,400/month, depending on experience.

Reports to: FDC support operations, with a named mentor for your first 90 days.

The work

FDC Servers runs bare metal infrastructure across more than thirty data centers in North America, Europe, and Asia. Before any server reaches a customer, it has to be built and proven: hardware detected and verified, disks sanitized, firmware checked, health validated under our automated pipeline. Hundreds of machines move through that pipeline every month, and every one that passes becomes sellable inventory the same week.

You'd be one of the technicians running it. Working through IPMI and BMC consoles, driving network boot and automated install flows, reading SMART data and hardware detection output, deciding whether a failure is a bad disk, a dead cable, a firmware mismatch, or a process problem, and moving each machine to a real disposition rather than letting it sit.

Everything is remote and internal-facing. There's no customer contact in this role. Your writing goes to teammates and engineers, so we care that your notes are clear and complete rather than polished.

We're hiring across the L1 and L2 band. Where you land is set at offer, based on what you show us rather than on your last title.

The part of the job that matters most

Running the pipeline is the job description. Finding the patterns is where the value is.

If the same wipe failure shows up three times in a week, we'd like to hear about it, with the evidence, before anyone asks. If a batch of machines from one vendor keeps failing hardware detection the same way, that observation is worth more to us than a hundred routine passes. The technicians who grow fastest here are the ones who notice, say something, and propose the fix.

Here's how we think about it: the job is getting servers built and proven, and the value is finding the thing that gets the next hundred through faster.

That shapes what we measure. We look at machines moved to real outcomes and at patterns found, not at hours logged or actions taken. If a wipe keeps failing, we'd much rather you stop and ask why than retry it forty times, and you'll never be penalized for pausing to investigate. Making a problem disappear permanently is the most valuable thing you can do here, and it's what we notice at review time.

You don't need a data center background

We care about what you can do more than where you learned it. Backgrounds that work well here:

• You run a homelab. Secondhand servers, a NAS you built, Proxmox VE or ESXi, machines you've flashed, bricked, and recovered.

• You've built or repaired PCs seriously: diagnosing dead boards, reading POST behavior, knowing why a machine won't boot.

• You've administered game servers or community infrastructure where real users noticed downtime.

• NOC, field tech, or repair bench experience at an ISP, telco, or shop.

• Self-taught, with no degree, having learned by breaking things in a VM and reading documentation. That works. We test skills rather than paperwork.

Our interview goes into detail on the work you describe, so what helps you most is depth you can talk through.

Technical baseline

This is what we test.

• Hardware. Server components and how they fail. Disk types and interfaces, SMART attributes and what predicts failure, RAID basics, memory and thermal faults, BIOS and UEFI configuration.

• Boot and management planes. IPMI or equivalent BMC access, console redirection, network boot fundamentals (what has to happen between power-on and an OS installer starting).

• Linux command line. Comfortable reading logs, running diagnostics, following a runbook precisely, and knowing when what you're seeing means the runbook doesn't apply.

• Written English clear enough for a teammate to act on. Your notes let the next shift continue without re-investigating. We're reading for clarity and completeness only. This is not a customer-facing role, and accent or polish plays no part in the screen. If you later move to the support track, we train that side with you.

Nice to have

• PXE, DHCP, or network-boot troubleshooting experience

• Firmware update experience on NICs, drives, or BMCs

• Any scripting, in anything

• Ansible exposure, or curiosity about it. Our pipeline runs on automation, and the technicians who learn to extend it tend to advance fastest.

Certifications aren't required. We test the baseline directly, so not having one won't count against you.

Things worth knowing before you apply

This isn't piecework, and volume of activity on its own isn't what gets noticed here. We can see the difference between forty retries and one diagnosis, and it's the diagnosis we reward.

It's also not a dead-end seat. The path above is real, funded, and already how our current team works.

The role does ask you to speak up when something looks wrong, including when nobody has asked you. If that's comfortable for you, you'll do well here.

How to apply

Send a CV if you have one. Then send the thing that really gets our attention, one of:

• A description of your homelab or bench: what's in it, what broke, how you figured out why.

• A war story. The worst hardware problem you've chased, what you thought it was, and what it turned out to be.

• Something you automated or scripted, however small.

Two or three paragraphs is plenty. For people without a conventional background, this carries more weight than the CV.

How we hire

A written screening exercise first, then a live technical interview with scenario questions about real failures. "I don't know, here's how I'd find out" is a good answer here. We tell you yes or no either way, with the reason.