Senior Systems Adinistrator

This position reports to the Associate Vice President Technology. The position completes efforts and projects related to the design, installation, operation, support, upgrades, and maintenance of infrastructure, including software, servers, networking, and storage. Administers, maintains, and supports complex and critical infrastructure. Provides user support for server hosting requests, problem resolution, system changes and upgrades. Analyzes infrastructure performance and resolves problems or makes appropriate recommendations. Ensures that all aspects of operability are delivered as part of the implementation process while also ensuring that existing service level is maintained or improved. Contributes to and ensures full compliance to operational standards, procedures, and best practices. This position functions as a resource and expert in all data storage needs and complex architectures required by mission critical applications for the university. Possesses extensive knowledge and best practices for disk array local and remote replication and mirroring, NAS (Network Attached Storage), NAS Virtualization, SAN (Storage Area Network), Backup Methodologies and Technologies, complex disk array software and administration tools on various storage array subsystems and platforms.

Required Qualifications

· A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or closely related degree

· 10-15 years system administration or equivalent experience

· 10-15 years' experience working with large scale 3 tier environments (servers; web server applications, databases)

· 10-15 years of progressively responsible experience installing, supporting, and managing application software and related hardware and software infrastructure

· 10 years administration experience with primarily Linux server O/S

· Strong trouble shooting skills with the ability to understand an environment and how to troubleshoot at the environment level (network, hardware, application, database, etc.)

· Proven experience to quickly troubleshoot and fix difficult technical problems

· Proficient installing, configuring, supporting complex Linux infrastructure environments.

· Skilled installing, configuring, supporting three tier environments (web-app-DB)MS SQL Server

· Advanced technical training with Linux and Windows

· Knowledge of industry-standard best practices for IT support (e.g., ITIL) change control, project. management, and software development

· Proficiency in scripting and writing troubleshooting scripts

Preferred Qualifications

· Technically savvy with a solid understanding of networks and technology infrastructure

· Must have written and interpersonal skills essential when communicating with clients

· Time-management skills and the ability to establish reasonable and attainable deadlines for resolution

· Customer focus and ability to understand customer needs.

· Experienced effectively communicating with a variety of people in different roles, i.e., clients, management, and technical staff

· Strong oral and written and communication skills

· Ability to coordinate the activities of a diverse set of IT resources in a matrix environment, while performing multiple roles of server and application support, providing technical consultation and project coordination

· Proven ability to prioritize, organize, and multi-task in a fast-paced environment

· Proven collaboration & teamwork abilities; proven initiative, established professionalism and proficiency, basic project management experience, technical documentation skills

Essential Job Functions

1. Must have strong strategic planning, system administration, and development technology skills

2. Ability to prioritize and manage several projects and milestones

3. Leads planning, development, and coordination of operations and projects for current and future infrastructures

4. Anticipates impact of growth and changes in operations, and recommends design and/or process changes

5. Participates in disaster recovery/business continuity planning including backup and recovery procedures and higher availability configurations.

6. Ensures data/media recoverability by implementing a schedule of system backups and database archive operations

7. Serves as project liaison - implementations or upgrades, acts as the focal point for communications between Cyber security and the other Project Leaders

8. Facilitates coordination and a thorough understanding of requirements, attends project meetings, creates written meeting notes, creates appropriate ticketing, etc.

9. In depth knowledge of and support experience in SAN, NAS, DASD, fiber channel, and cloud storage environments

10. Maintains policies and standard procedures to increase system uptime

11. Identifies training needs and keeps current on application technologies

12. Monitors security alerts and ensures that appropriate patches are applied in an automated and timely fashion; works with developers to patch or upgrade custom code for security compliance

13. Documents and maintains system standards; researches and recommends innovative approaches for system administration tasks

14. Creates and maintains standard OS installation images for virtualization templates

15. Monitors application performance on servers

16. Evaluates and manages appropriate software and hardware allocations to achieve an optimum performance level

17. Possesses extended knowledge of NAS constructs (Aggregation, Volume I Filesystem, Replication, Snapshots, QTrees I Virtual Volumes)

18. Possesses basic knowledge of TCP/IP and related protocols

19. Possesses knowledge of replication requirements for effective disaster recovery Understand NTFS security

20. Performs backup support for NAS, Windows, and Unix systems

21. Performs capacity planning for projecting future growth

22. In collaboration with development project teams, builds, rebuilds, and/or updates servers and configures hardware and virtual machines (VM), applications, peripherals, services, networking, storage

23. Performs other duties as assigned

OTHER FUNCTIONS and RESPONSIBILITIES

Performs other related duties and special projects as assigned; some evening, weekend, and holiday hours are required; on call rotation may be required.