The role:
CLOCKSS is looking for a self-employed contractor to serve as our technical services and infrastructure director. This is a broad role combining hands-on technical work with strategic planning, vendor management, partner liaison, and operational governance. It requires technical skills in Linux systems administration, infrastructure support, and troubleshooting, along with management and communication skills. You will oversee our administrative and technical systems and play an important liaison role with the LOCKSS team based at Stanford University and the academic organizations round the world which host CLOCKSS nodes. You will work closely with these colleagues to ensure the CLOCKSS archive remains healthy, reliable, secure, and well-supported.
About CLOCKSS:
We are a long-term digital archive for scholarship and operate in a complex ecosystem of preservation technology, physical hosting partners, library and publisher system integrations, and strategic infrastructure.
About you:
This role would suit a consultant who enjoys bridging operational detail and strategic oversight. You will exercise judgment, build relationships with and coordinate multiple technical partners, and advise leadership, as well as carrying out administrative tasks. You may have experience of long-term digital preservation, or this mission should resonate strongly with you. You’ll be able to provide technical leadership and operational oversight for CLOCKSS by coordinating the work of external technical partners without having line management responsibility for staff employed by these organizations.
Location:
Remote; can be anywhere in the world so long as you can work comfortably during normal business hours with colleagues in the UK and US. Note that other colleagues are based around the world, so occasionally greater time flexibility will be needed.
Responsibilities:
- Budget management – Prepare technical and infrastructure budgets and forecasts and manage operational costs. Liaise with the CLOCKSS Accountant to maintain the fixed asset register.
- Business continuity and disaster preparedness – Maintain disaster recovery and business continuity plans and skills. Coordinate incident response and post-incident reviews.
- Documentation – Migrate the CLOCKSS wiki and develop/maintain the technical documentation required for our accreditation as a trusted digital archive. Develop and maintain guidelines and other documents for libraries and publishers who deposit content into the CLOCKSS archive. Maintain architecture and system diagrams.
- Environmental Impact – Ensure the CLOCKSS environmental impact, and particularly its carbon footprint, is calculated and develop approaches to deliver services while reducing these impacts.
- Hardware and Infrastructure – Procure, configure, and manage servers including installation and maintenance of operating systems, as well as storage, networking, virtual machines, and cloud services. Manage software RAID and disk replacement procedures, including responding to disk failures and coordinating the shipment of replacement disks to CLOCKSS partners. Forecast capacity and performance requirements and plan upgrades.
- Monitoring – Work with the LOCKSS team to develop capacity and tools to create a dashboard to enable us to monitor storage use, integrity checking, and node availability.
- Node Network – Build effective technical relationships with the hosts of machines in our global network. Support the onboarding of new node hosts, and the delivery/installation/removal of hardware and software to/from node hosts.
- Relationship Management – Ensure our partners in the LOCKSS team at Stanford, node host organizations, and other technical partners all work well together in CLOCKSS’s interests.
- Security – Assess risks, commission penetration and other security tests, monitor vulnerabilities, respond to alerts, review security matters with partners and service providers, and act to detect and correct problems. Maintain passwords and credential management procedures.
- Service provider management – Coordinate all technical service providers (e.g. administrative systems and support providers, CLOCKSSface software developers, website developers, and our LOCKSS partners). Review and optimize performance. Manage SLAs.
- Software – Install software and updates as needed. Coordinate maintenance and upgrade windows. Manage software licenses, certificates, registrations, and technical subscriptions.
- Technical projects – Lead on technical aspects of projects such as new services, migrations, integrations, automation and infrastructure improvements. Track technical actions arising from meetings.
- Support – Serve as an escalation point for technical issues affecting publishers, libraries, preservation nodes, or the CLOCKSS team and liaise effectively with the LOCKSS team and other service providers as needed to track and resolve issues.
- Strategic advice – Consider whether our current approaches are sustainable. Ensure the Executive Director and Board understand technical risks and options and future investment needs. Recommend infrastructure investments.
- Triggered content – Act as technical owner on the CLOCKSS side during trigger events, and lead on the technical hosting, access, and accessibility of triggered content.
Time commitment:
This is a half-time role with a variable time commitment. We envisage:
• Routine operations: 1 day/week
• Projects: another 1.5 days/week when needed, and this extra time will certainly be needed for at least the first year
• Emergency availability: on call
Budget:
Dependent on experience and location.
To apply:
Please send a CV, an application letter, and contact details for two professional references. In the application letter please answer the following questions with concise, evidence-based answers drawing on your own experience wherever possible:
• Your interest and relevant experience – Please briefly describe your interest in working with CLOCKSS and identify the aspects of your experience that you believe are most relevant to this role.
• Technical leadership and judgement – Please describe a situation in which you have been responsible for overseeing a complex technical environment involving multiple systems, suppliers, teams, or organizations. Please explain what the environment was, what your responsibilities were, how you identified and managed technical risks, how you decided what needed your direct attention and what could be delegated, how you communicated technical issues and options to non-technical decisionmakers; and what you learned from the experience.
• Working through external partners – CLOCKSS works with the LOCKSS team at Stanford University, organizations hosting preservation nodes around the world, and other technical service providers. The Director will need to coordinate these relationships in CLOCKSS’s interests without having line-management authority over the people involved. Please give an example of a situation where you had to achieve an important technical or operational outcome primarily through influence, coordination, and relationship management rather than direct authority. What did you do, and what was the outcome?
• Technical priorities and risk – Please describe the principles you would use to assess our organization and its risks, resilience, security, dependencies, and strategy. You do not need to make assumptions about CLOCKSS’s current systems. We are interested in how you would approach such an assessment.
• Availability and practical arrangements – Please confirm your location/time zone, your general availability during UK and US business hours, your ability to provide emergency/on-call availability when required, your availability for the anticipated routine and project workload and your proposed day rate or other fee basis.
The application deadline is 1 November 2026. Please send applications to awise@clockss.org
Short-listed applicants will be interviewed on 20 November between 4-7pm UK time / 8-11am California time.