[HIRING] Russian-Speaking VoIP Engineer — Asterisk / FreePBX / Kamailio, Remote Project

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Language requirement: Fluent Russian is required for communication with our team and for the system handover.

VoIP Engineer (Asterisk / FreePBX) — Moving Telephony Management to Git, End-to-End Project

Location: Fully remote; the candidate’s location does not matter
Work format: Remote
Employment: Part-time / project-based
Rate: USD 15–30/hour net during the system takeover stage; afterwards, fixed payment for agreed project stages
Time zone: Europe, preferably within ±2 hours of CET

About the project

We operate a telecom business in France: paid consultation lines and office telephony with approximately 30 internal extensions.

The system has been running for many years, but it has been maintained by one person, is managed manually, and is almost undocumented.

The task is to take over the infrastructure and prepare it for transfer to a new specialist.

You will not be responsible for ongoing support after the project is completed. The team must be able to make planned changes through Git using a clear process, and all information must remain in the repository and instructions rather than only in the engineer’s head.

Technology stack

  • Asterisk / FreePBX
  • Kamailio
  • FastAGI with routing logic through MariaDB
  • SIP trunks from several operators
  • fail2ban
  • FOP2
  • Zabbix
  • Proxmox virtual machines

Scope of work

Stage 1 — Take over the system

The current specialist will have limited availability.

Tasks:

  • take over access credentials, configurations, routing and information about typical incidents;
  • create a telephony map showing what works where and what each component is responsible for.

Stage 2 — Move management to Git

Tasks:

  • place FreePBX and Kamailio configurations, the dialplan and FastAGI scripts in Git with clear comments;

  • prepare a test environment for checking changes before production;

  • establish the following process:

    branch → test environment → deployment → one-command rollback

  • propose the appropriate level of automation;

  • write runbooks for typical operations and incidents for an engineer who is not familiar with the system;

  • eliminate the causes of recurring problems:

    • office IP addresses being blocked by fail2ban;
    • recurring certificate issues;
    • disk space being filled by call recordings.

Acceptance criteria

A specialist who did not participate in the project must be able to independently perform the following tasks using only the repository and instructions:

  • add an extension;
  • change an IVR;
  • upload a voice prompt;
  • restore the service after a simulated failure in the test environment.

These tasks must be completed without your assistance.

If the specialist cannot complete them, the project will not be accepted and the relevant work must be revised.

Requirements

  • 3+ years of production experience with Asterisk and FreePBX, including dialplan and AGI/FastAGI;
  • confident SIP diagnostics using sngrep and tcpdump;
  • experience with Linux, systemd, fail2ban, certificates and MariaDB;
  • Git is mandatory;
  • Ansible or another Infrastructure as Code tool is desirable;
  • the ability to write clear instructions is half of the expected result;
  • Kamailio experience is a strong advantage;
  • fluent Russian is required.

Terms and payment

The project will be divided into small parts with fixed prices and verifiable results.

Stage 1 will be paid hourly.

The result of Stage 1 must include:

  • a telephony map;
  • a breakdown of the project into 6–10 parts;
  • a price for each part.

Completion of each part must be verifiable within 15 minutes.

The remaining parts will be paid after acceptance.

15% of the total project amount will be paid after the first month of independent operation by our team.

All access credentials and secrets must be stored in the company’s storage.

All code must be stored in our GitLab from the first day.

Payment can be made to an EU legal entity against an invoice or directly to a freelancer.

Selection process

The selection process includes:

  • a short call;
  • 2–3 practical cases based on real incidents:
    • SIP trace analysis;
    • PBX failure;
    • fail2ban incident.

When applying, please include

  1. Describe the most complex Asterisk case you have worked on and how you solved it.
  2. Explain how you would organize FreePBX management through Git for a team.

Company: Eastern Country Digital Services s. r. o.
Contact: Telegram — @tarasenko_r

2

$15 an hour?

3

yes $15 an hour

4

USD 15 an hour is less than the minimum wage for those 21 and above in the UK. Anyone contracting individually in the UK would expect considerably more than the minimum age, even for low skilled work, and an employer would have to mark up the minimum wage to allow for profit and certain expenditures they are legally required to make in relation to employees. You are not asking for the sort of person that would work for the minimum wage. I don’t know about the minimum wage in the US, but you are still going to have to offer several times it, for anyone who is likely to be reading the two forums you have definitely posted on.

5

True. One of my sons delivers pizzas for a larger chain and makes significantly more than $15 USD an hour.

6

Shockingly it’s still sitting at $7.50 USD so $15 USD/hour is double the Federal minimum, however, numerous states over ride this and have their own minimum wage. Sadly only about a 3rd of the states have $15 USD or higher as their minimum.

However, even in the US a tech job at $15/hour USD that isn’t entry level isn’t worth it.

7

Lots of great uninformed replies here. :wink:

Go ask your favorite AI tool about wages in Russian-speaking parts of Europe. You’ll find that $15-30 per hour is anywhere from 3x to 10x the national average wage. And that in most countries the minimum wage is < $2 equivalent.

OP’s main problem here is not under-bidding, it’s posting his job on a forum with mainly US and western European readers.

8

Chick-Fil-A pays starting pay of $19/hour to take orders and hand out food. I don’t think there will be many takers for foreign language VOIP engineers at your proposed hourly rate. Try $45/hour and up for skilled and experienced engineers.

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I’m not proposing any hourly rates.

10

Must be this is a joke :smiley: $15 p.h Wow…
Im speaking less Russian call me..

11

Good point. Gemini came back with typical software engineer wages in Russia ranging between $9 and $17 USD an hour. It is all relative to the cost of living versus wages depending on the geographical location.

For example, our US-based company has in-house Business Central development (i.e. - me). When I need backstopping we reach out to our US-based BC partner. Who charges $200/hr for dev work. Or we could reach out to a third party dev shop based in India. Who charges $75/hr for dev work.

12

You’d earn more per hour if you were a beggar on the street.

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And a smattering of those of us in Africa, Nigeria specifically, with eyes firmly set on these two markets. I’m glad @kierknoby raised the eyebrow.

14

What metrics or knowledge set would you use to determine an “experienced” engineer?

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In this case, I’d start out with being fluent in Linux, specifically Debian. Next, someone who has set up, maintained, and repaired FreePBX/Asterisk/Debian hardware and software. Then you want someone who knows how to implement/maintain the addons suchs as Zabbix, Kamaillio, etc. There is so much more required by this request from the OP. This is not a beginning or leaning position. This is a job that should be implemented by highly experienced people that don’t require “on the job” learning about the products. The request basically needs an engineer, a project manager, a maintenance tech, technical writer, trainer, and a systems administrator all rolled into one position. That will be almost impossible to find in a single person. If it were me, I’d hire a firm that can provide those services. Such work will cost much more than what is initially put forth in that request although they don’t state monetary amounts for the various project steps.

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I thinks the Kamailio part alone should command well over $15/hr. Took me 4 years messing with FreePBX to eventually understand what Kamailio is and its role in front of the PBX. I had to gently ease myself into that using dSIP and reading the Kamailio docs like crazy.

Thanks for articulating those