Hiring for infrastructure role

[tstellar]

The LLVM Foundation would like to hire someone to help maintain the infrastructure for the project. We would like this working groups to help to define the scope for the role and also to find qualified candidates.

[ChristianKuehnel]

From the meeting in 2021-04-13:

• tasks/goals for this role:
  • System Admin type of work, keep infrastructure up and running
  • Have SLAs to respond to issues, e.g. 24/7
  • Help community set up infrastructure, perform migrations, ...
• Contract work, hiring a company
  • company is probably more flexible, foundation is not hiring individuals (at the moment)
  • probably we want a group of professionals able to guarantee SLAs
  • Can we hire non-USA / non-California? Yes, company needs to have experience with contracts in the US though.
  • for any contracts: we need to go through an official RFP process across multiple companies.
  • initial work items:
  • keep websites up and running
• Option: Extend Access Softek contract to cover this?
  • In any case, we should contact them first.
• Hours per week: maybe start with part time and ramp up as needed
• work split:
  • IWG to create the RFPs for the work
  • sysadmin/company to do the work
• required skills:
  • IWG to prioritize the list of services to be taken over
  • system administration
  • Amazon AWS
  • customizing off-the-shelf services (e.g. Phabricator)
  • fix the source code in case of outages/upgrades
• Tom to create a draft, Philip, Christian to help
  • start with problem description
  • maybe ruse the infrastructuresurvey we collected.

[ChristianKuehnel]

meeting on 2021-04-27:

• Access Softek is generally interested, details to be discussed per work package once we have more details on what we need.

[tstellar]

Here is an initial problem statement / role description: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-iwg/pull/41

[ChristianKuehnel]

I created a proposal for an RFP process within the LLVM foundation. Google doc right now for easier comments, feel free to request access if you're interested. Let me know if I should convert this into a markdown file in this repo.

[ChristianKuehnel]

meeting on 2021-09-14:

• News from the board:
  • Board is looking into getting a consultant to support with the process.
  • we should wait for the outcome of that discussion

• if that does not work out, an alternative option would be:

  The board asks Christian and the IWG to work with the LLVM foundation's lawyer to: 1) Work out a process to run the RFP. 2) Work out templates for the neccesary documents (to be used for all future RFPs).

  The drafts of that work shall be public, reviewed by the community and approved by the board.

  In addition the IWG shall propose a list of initial services to be handed over to the contractor and share with the community for review.

[ChristianKuehnel]

from meeting on 2021-09-28:

• Foundation was not yet able to fin a consultant to help with the RFP.
• Looking for help with the process from the community.
• Start with a as-simple-as-possible template. Ideas for sections:
  • Scope of work
  • when/how to submit
• @ChristianKuehnel to sync with @sqlbyme on next steps.
• Start with a Google doc for the template.

[ChristianKuehnel]

proposal for the hiring process

[ChristianKuehnel]

meeting on 2021-11-09:

• So far: Christian did not find any documents he could share with the LLVM foundation.
• We need to get started writing the RFP ourselves.

[ChristianKuehnel]

no progress here at the moment.

[ChristianKuehnel]

Sorry, I forgot to add the links to the current set of draft documents up for discussion:

• RFP process (how we run the RFP)
• RFP document (the contract document itself)
• Initial working packages (to get things started)

All of these are early drafts to get the discussion started. If you don't have access, please let request it via Google Docs.

[ChristianKuehnel]

some updates based on my discussion with @tlattner :

• we should probably start with a couple of smaller working packages
• hiring a contractor will require some legal support for all the contract.
• Tanya will discuss timeline and initial working packages with the board.