Senior UNIX Systems Administrator

Overview

What We Do

We calm the confusion of IT by guiding the connection between people and technology. If a customer is looking for a better way to manage their warehouse inventory, equip their workforce, or secure their data, we make it happen. All it takes is finding the right combination of tech hardware, software, cloud solutions, and support services. That's what we do. We're the IT Department's IT Department.

Who We Are

Our team is made stronger by a multitude of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. It's what makes Connection unique-what drives us to innovate and create technology solutions that stand apart from the crowd. We'd love for you to be a part of that fabric, to share your ideas and experiences with a team that thrives on fresh thinking, creativity, and helping others.

Why You Should Join Us

You'll find supportive teammates and a rewarding career at Connection-plus great benefits. We take pride in supporting employees with a total rewards package that provides financial, emotional, and physical resources for you and your family. Our compensation, 401k plans, medical insurance, and other benefits are progressive and competitive. We value the importance of our employees' emotional wellbeing. To support employees, we provide free therapy visits, mental health coaching and tools, and meditation resources. You'll also enjoy a generous paid time off package that includes not only vacation and sick time, but also Wellness and Volunteer Time Off days.

Responsibilities

The Senior UNIX System Administrator provides technical leadership and expertise related to UNIX and Linux server environments. The Sr System Administrator (Sys Admin) works under the general supervision and guidance of the Manager of UNIX Systems, and as a Senior member of the team is expected to utilize experience and judgment to plan and accomplish goals. The Sr Sys Admin is responsible for ensuring effective user support, system performance, change control, data security, data integrity, and daily maintenance and administration of the Unix and Linux operating systems, associated applications, and hardware and virtualization environments. The Sr Sys Admin recommends and develops optimized and automated processes and systems to improve reliability, scalability, and reduce toil. The Sr Sys Admin participates in systems design and deployment, and be responsible for monitoring, audit, incident management, lifecycle management, backup / recovery, and disaster recovery. Responsibilities are primarily focused on virtualized environments such PowerVM, VMware, and Nutanix, and cloud platforms such as Azure and AWS. The Sr Sys Admin works closely with application development and support teams, Cloud Reliability Engineers, Platform Engineering, Database Administration, Network Technology, and Security / Compliance teams, to ensure that Connection's applications are properly functioning and operating efficiently.

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES :

System Administration :

Assumes primary responsibility for all things UNIX and Linux; embodies a strong sense of accountability and ownership.

Installs, upgrades, configures, tests, maintains, and supports operating system software across multiple environments (e.g. production, QA, development, and training).

Installs, upgrades, configures, tests, maintains, and supports supporting infrastructure, including hardware, virtualization and cloud platforms, management and monitoring tools, and resiliency tools such as backup, clustering, and DR solutions. Collaborate with other IT teams where these resources are shared or where primary ownership lies elsewhere.

Installs, upgrades, configures, tests, maintains, and supports certain applications where separate dedicated application administrators do not exist.

Builds for resilience; develops, implements and supports high-availability and disaster recovery strategies for the operating system environments including load-balancing, backup, restore, replication and fail-over methods.

Architects and executes migration of existing, traditional infrastructure workloads between on-premise data centers and to and from cloud environments.

Recommends and directs software changes and updates to keep business systems up to date. Monitors any software changes. Manages maintenance of the operating system to include rollout and upgrade schedules.

Ensures that system hardware, operating systems, software systems, and related procedures adhere to organizational values and policies.

Technical Support :

Reacts with a strong sense of urgency to unexpected outages and issues across all environments. Participates in a weekly on-call rotation for 24x7 coverage of production systems.

Troubleshoots and resolves complex system hardware, software and communications problems. Collaborates with other teams and assists in troubleshooting issues across the whole stack - hardware, software, applications, and network.

• Performs and / or oversees daily system monitoring, verifying the integrity and availability of all hardware, server resources, systems and key processes. Reviews system and application logs.
• Monitors automated processes including scheduled jobs, reports, deployments, and backups.
• Provides support to Dev / Ops and Platform Engineering teams regarding the creation and implementation of systems and automated processes.
• Provides support to Database Administrators to recommend optimal logical and physical database design and associated objects, including capacity sizing (CPU / RAM / Swap / storage) and storage layout and configuration for optimal I / O.

Participates in change management and major incident review (postmortem) processes.

Establishes baseline performance of existing systems and monitor these systems to identify and resolve performance issues.

Contributes to capacity planning and performance tuning exercises. Makes recommendations for future plan and budgetary needs.

Provides technical guidance to less experienced systems administrators.

Research, Development, and Design :

Participates in technical research and development to enable continuing innovation within the infrastructure. Provides recommendations for, and responds to requests from others for, new systems, software, and wholistic technology solutions.

Analyzes existing systems and programs and develops or recommends new systems or modifications to existing systems.

Collaborates with other IT and business resources to scope, research, develop, and implement new designs. Helps determine application architecture, upgrade roadmap, planning and execution.

Develops standard processes and procedures to automate the deployment, troubleshooting, monitoring, and recovery of infrastructure leveraging "infrastructure as code" practices where appropriate.

Considers future growth when proposing solutions and recognize that doing it right the first time is critical to the success of the department.

Project Management :

Participates in IT projects as a project resource, representing the system administration perspective, and acts as a project leader when needed.

Min

USD $104,996.00 / Yr.

Max

USD $135,445.00 / Yr.

Qualifications

Technical competencies :

Administration of UNIX / Linux operating systems, primarily AIX and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is required. Experience with other UNIX / Linux distributions would also be beneficial.

Administration of virtualization technologies, including utilizing dynamic resource allocation and mobility, is required. Experience with cloud infrastructure such as Azure, AWS, and PowerVS would also be beneficial.

Understanding of logical and physical enterprise system design concepts.

Proficient in the following concepts and technologies :

Proficient at automating system administration tasks and deployments using tools like shell scripting and Ansible. Experience with other programming languages and development or automation tools would also be beneficial.

Experience with monitoring and alerting technologies like Nagios, Datadog, or Galileo.

Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code concepts and workflows.

General familiarity with Data Center workflows.

Able to communicate highly technical information, both orally and in writing, with the ability to interact with team members, external vendors, various levels of management, and internal clients with assorted levels of technical experience.

Proficient in creating architectural and data flow diagrams, design runbooks and standard operating procedure documentation.

Business Competencies :

Project management skills with ability to author and manage projects from inception to completion.

Technology and business aptitude with the ability to comprehend and deploy new or existing technologies in order to meet internal business initiatives.

Ability to collaborate with a variety of personalities and skill sets while improving the quality of IT processes, services, and products.

Excellent written communication skills with ability to compose professional business communications via email, letter, and proposals.

Excellent verbal communication skills with ability to present professional demonstrations.

Behavioral Competencies :

Adaptable, with ability to switch tasks based on shifting priorities in a fast-paced organization.

Intuitive, with ability to perceive others' feelings and motives quickly from subtle signals.

Decisive, with ability to make a prompt determination and substantiate decision if challenged.

Strong interpersonal skills with ability to work well with all levels of the organization.

Organized state of mind with ability to document activities, anticipate problems, plan schedules and monitor performance according to priorities and deadlines.

Quick study with ability to master a situation or learn new things with minimum direction or training.

Supportive mentor with ability to guide and develop team members.

Self-motivated with a strong aptitude and desire to learn.

Curious, collaborative, and humble team player.

Because of the possibility for fraudulent job postings on many popular job boards, please be advised that Connection will never offer a position of employment without a complete interview process and communication with a "live person".