Assistant System Administrator

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Position type: Full-Time 12-Month
Department: 062900 - Computer Science and Engineering
Location: Main Campus - Starkville, MS
Categories: Professional
Position Open Date: Aug 5 2025

Position Function:

The Assistant System Administrator in the Computer Science and Engineering department provides system support and planning under supervision of the College of Engineering's System Administrator. The primary duties include the administration, installation, maintenance, and support of software systems, hardware systems, and networking infrastructure, user training, performance monitoring and configuration planning for faculty, staff, and students in the Computer Science and Engineering department.

Part of the Bagley College of Engineering, the department has approximately 680 undergraduate majors and 85 graduate students. The department offers undergraduate programs in Computer Science and Software Engineering, jointly administers an undergraduate program in Computer Engineering with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and is in the process to offer a Cybersecurity undergraduate program soon. At the graduate level, we offer M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and M.S. degree in Cyber Security and Operations, and the faculty directs graduate students in Computational Engineering.

Certificates in Information Assurance, Cyber Operations and Computational Biology are also available. In the last fiscal year, research expenditures totaled to about $6 million dollars. Research core areas for the department are security and cryptography, artificial intelligence, computational science, visualization and graphics, bioinformatics, parallel and distributed computing, software engineering, human-robot interaction, augmented and virtual reality, and computer science education. Faculty in the department are active in many university research centers such as the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems, the Center for Cyber Innovation, the Center for Computational Science and the Institute for Genomics, Biocomputing & Biotechnology.

Mississippi State University has been designated as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations, Cyber Defense Research and Cyber Defense Education by the National Security Agency. The High Performance Computing Collaboratory at Mississippi State University houses a collection of supercomputers, among which Orion is the 4th fastest in U.S. academia.

Anticipated Appointment Date:

August 2025.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

The following essential duties are representative of major duties of positions in this classification. The absence of specific statements of duties does not exclude those tasks from the position if the work is similar, related or a logical assignment of the position. Other duties may be assigned consistent with the knowledge, skills and abilities required for the job. Not all of the duties may be assigned to a position.

Duties & Responsibilities:

• Develop and document operational procedures for servers. network usage and access.

• Participation in long-range planning for upgrading software, hardware and network upgrades.

• Monitor server and network performance to insure quick response times and minimum down time of services to meet user needs.

• Configure, install and maintain on-premises instructional servers, cloud computing, and virtual clusters.

• Configure, install and maintain networking hardware used in instructional labs.

• Diagnose and repair hardware and software problems in both client and server environment as well as network infrastructure.

• Purchasing, installation and maintenance of server hardware, networking environment, and cloud resources.

• Assists with implementation and maintenance of the server, and as needed, serving as a backup.

• Administration of backup systems to provide daily backups for all servers and disaster recovery operations.

• Experience with local area networks including TCP/IP, firewalls, wireless and Ethernet

• Oversees or provides direction to student employees.

• Maintains a broad knowledge of state-of-the-art technology, equipment, and/or systems; participates in…