Employment Opportunities at FamilySearch

It takes me forever to find the link anytime anyone asks me, so as I’ve done with several other items that I always wish to find, I’m going to blog about it. Then I’ll always know where to find it.

I’m speaking of the employment website for FamilySearch. Since FamilySearch is the public brand for the Family History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it may not surprise you to learn that positions are listed on the Church’s employment website or that employees must be members of the Church in good standing.

Each time I try to find it, my circumlocutious route to the website is:

• Start at www.providentliving.com, a website provided by the Church to assist members achieve self-reliance.
• In the left margin, click on Employment.
• Search around a bit, clicking on various dead ends, but eventually discovering that Find Jobs and Other Opportunities takes me to where I can…
• Click on Visit the Church Employment Web site.

This leads to what may be a semi-permanent URL for the Church Employment web site:

www.lds.org/emp

The software currently used seems most excellent. (The URL resulting from a search shows that the software used is from Taleo.)

One can submit a profile (resume, etc.) for comparison to current and future job postings. One can then sign up for automatic e-mail notifications of matching postings. (See the example, above.)

A search for “FamilySearch” currently returns two postings, although there may be others that make no mention of FamilySearch.

• Senior IT Architect
  Full-time, UT-Salt Lake City
  Job Posting: Jul 31, 2009-Job Number 0900314
• German or US-Canada Research Consultant
  Full-time, UT-Salt Lake City
  Job Posting: Jul 27, 2009-Job Number 0900297

The first of these two posts reveals somewhat of the size and scope of FamilySearch’s future operations:

The scale of the FamilySearch infrastructure assume[s] millions of users and terabytes of structured information and tens of petabytes of image data and thousands of servers.  For these reasons the desired candidate should [have] several years of experience architecting and building infrastructures that include:

·    Enterprise class large SMP Servers (e.g. Sun M9000 or larger)
·    Enterprise class Databases with more than 4TB of synchronized storage handling thousands of transactions per second
·    5000+ slot tape libraries
·    Multiple petabyte Enterprise Storage Arrays (Hitachi, EMC, DDN)

DDN? I didn’t know I had been out of the storage industry so long, but I’ve never heard of DDN. Apparently, FamilySearch affiliate, Footnote.com has. Footnote.com’s parent company, iArchives, is one of the case studies mentioned on the DDN web site.

Anyways, its plain to see that FamilySearch has big plans. Pretty cool stuff…