Senior Systems Administrator

Overview

POSITION SUMMARY

The Senior Systems Administrator is responsible for the administration, implementation, and ongoing maintenance of the organization’s server and network infrastructure, including system security, standards, and operational procedures. This role works closely with IT teams and business units to ensure the reliability, performance, and security of networks, servers, operating systems, and applications.

The position provides technical leadership and consultation on complex infrastructure initiatives and plays a key role in planning, deploying, patching, and upgrading physical, virtual, and storage environments.

The Senior Systems Administrator also supports network troubleshooting and incident response as needed and provides on-site and remote support across City facilities to ensure continuous, 24-hour operations and the stability of integrated network and computing systems.

Reports to: Systems Engineer

Direct Reports: None

System Administration (80% of time)

• Serves as mentor and provides technical guidance to System Administrators and the Help Desk operations on the city’s infrastructure, systems, and applications.
• Administers the city’s network, servers, operating systems, and applications, ensuring that all systems are up-to-date and secure.
• Configures and manages user accounts, access controls, and directory services for newly deployed systems and applications.
• Advises and partners with the Network Engineer on the identification, analysis, and mitigation of infrastructure security risks.
• Performs regular backups of all enterprise storage systems, network shares, and other server systems. Ensure data is properly protected and perform restores as necessary.
• Develops and implements backup and recovery procedures to protect critical information in the event of system failure.
• Provides complex technical evaluation, diagnosis and resolution to support end-user hardware and software issues and ensures the efficient operation of IT systems.
• Performs capacity planning for servers and storage systems. Determines need and schedule for maintenance, upgrades, and equipment refresh.
• Evaluates and recommends administrative tools, technologies, and processes to improve efficiency, security, and cost effectiveness.
• Creates and updates documentation for servers, networks, storage, and backup environments and ensures audit compliance.
• Stays up to date on the latest IT trends, technologies, and industry best practices.
• Travels to multiple site work locations and participates in an on-call rotation within the 24-hour operations.

Project Management (15 % of time)

• Leads and manages project implementation of complex network and server systems involving multiple groups, departments, and/or vendors.
• Conducts risk assessments by gathering customer feedback, analyzing needs, identifying solutions to determine resource allocation, system configuration, solving user problems across the enterprise platform, and vendor selection recommendations.
• Installs, configures, and maintains servers, network devices, virtual server environment and related software.
• Troubleshoots network and server problems at all levels of the system including physical wiring, hardware, or software failure and communications protocol problems; takes appropriate action to resolve such problems.
• Provides guidance and training to new and existing employees on features, capabilities, and policies of assigned system applications for optimal utilization.

Additional duties as assigned (5%):

• Performs 24-hour on-call duty as needed.
• Provide coverage for system administration team, network team, business applications team, and helpdesk team as needed.
• Performs other duties as assigned and required.

Minimum Qualifications

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or a related field.

Work Experience

• 5 years of experience working with IT systems.
• 2 years of experience in a senior-level position managing and supporting complex IT infrastructure.

Certifications and Licensures

• One of the following certifications:
  CompTIA Security+, VMWare Certification,…