Network

Job Description for Senior System Administrator

Role Description

This is a full-time remote role for a Senior System Administrator. We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Senior System Administrator to manage and ensure the efficient operation of our computer systems, networks, and data security systems. The ideal candidate will have a strong technical background, excellent problem-solving skills, and a deep understanding of system administration and IT infrastructure management. This role demands expertise in delivering outstanding remote support to our diverse team across various time zones, including Dubai and the USA, by swiftly managing urgent issues and implementing solutions that uphold peak system performance and security.

Key Responsibilities:

• Provide technical guidance and support to users, addressing and resolving IT-related issues in a timely manner.
• Ensure system and data security is maintained at a high level, implementing protective measures against unauthorized access, modification, or destruction.
• Monitor system performance, troubleshoot issues, and ensure the long-term efficiency of IT services and systems.
• Collaborate with IT team members and other departments to identify needs, evaluate potential enhancements, and implement solutions that support business objectives.
• Oversee and manage the installation, maintenance, and support of the organization's IT infrastructure, including servers, networks, operating systems, and associated hardware and software.
• Develop and maintain disaster recovery plans to ensure data is securely backed up and can be quickly restored.
• Stay current with the latest technologies and trends in system administration and IT infrastructure management.

Qualifications:

• Educational Background: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, or a related field.
• Professional Experience: Minimum of 7 years of experience in system or network administration, with at least 5 years in a senior role, specifically managing a hybrid IT infrastructure.

Core Technical Expertise:

• Hybrid Environment Mastery: Experience managing both on-premise components (Windows Server, Active Directory, VMWare virtualization, Veeam Backup, Exchange Server 2019) and cloud-based resources in Microsoft Azure (Office 365, Azure file services, storage solutions, web-based application hosting).
• Networking: Configuration and management of LAN and WAN, firewall setup, DNS, DHCP, and network troubleshooting. Proficiency in network performance monitoring and optimization tools.
• User Support: Support for user-level systems such as Windows 11, Microsoft Outlook, and telephone systems.
• Security Expertise: Comprehensive security knowledge, risk management, data protection, security infrastructure management, access control, and incident response.

Additional Qualifications:

• Problem-solving and Communication Skills: Exceptional problem-solving capabilities for complex technical issues. Strong communication skills for explaining technical and security-related matters to non-technical team members.
• Certifications: Possession of relevant certifications is highly valued, reflecting expertise in key areas:

·       General IT and Windows Environments: CompTIA A+, Microsoft Certified: Windows Server.

·       Microsoft Azure Cloud: Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate, Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert.

·       Networking: Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), CompTIA Network+.

·       Security: CompTIA Security+, Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)

Work Hours & Set up

·       Night Shift : 7:30 PM – 4:30 AM (Only applicants who can commit to this schedule will be considered).

·        Work from Home Setup

• Enterprise Network Implementation for Global Enterprise customers.
• Extensive experience in a network implementation environment gained in an ISP or telco or enterprise environment.
• Good technical knowledge and practical experience of BGP, OSPF routing protocols & switching technology.
• Conversant in best practices appropriate to network design and security.
• Understanding of hardware and software performance and scaling limitations.
• Network implementation, and management using Cisco Routers & switches ( Nexus & Catalyst), Juniper M and T series routers, and Aruba Wireless.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills – confidence and professionalism both in working with multinational project teams and with clients on various levels of the organisation, from technical audiences to senior management
• Analytical and critical thinking; innovative problem-solving capability for complex customer requirements
• Ability to work under pressure from both customers and internal stakeholders and produce solution designs that are deliverable

Experience:
• A minimum of 4 years’ total experience in the areas of Networking and Telecommunications technologies
• At least 2 years’ experience in dealing with large, corporate customers in a technical solution Implementation profile.

The Network Engineer position provides a secure network infrastructure and resolves any network security related findings. Evaluate and analyze new technologies for potential applicability to business needs. Design, install, and support the network infrastructure capable of supporting the business processes at Citizens Energy Group. Design, test, and implement a disaster recovery process and procedures for the network infrastructure. Maintain a solid technical knowledge of computer hardware, software and applications available within the industry to support our current systems and assist in planning future directions.

Detailed Description

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Responsible to provide on-call support in a 24/7 environment and remedy network outages or other interruptions.
• Maintain existing network equipment, installing new equipment and replacing faulty equipment in plant environments. Vendor and warranty management for network hardware and software.
• Design, implement, document, and test Disaster Recovery process and procedures for network infrastructure
• Manage network infrastructure backup and recovery processes
• Security and critical IOS update patch management
• Advise team for network infrastructure-related issues
• Proactive monitoring of to identify outages, service degradation, or security threats and responding accordingly
• Prepare, maintain, and adhere to procedures for logging, reporting, and statistically monitoring network data.
• Design, implement, and maintain network infrastructure to meet SLA requirements
• Design, implement, and maintain Firewall infrastructure for internal and remote use.
• Design, implement, and maintain network management platform for proactive monitoring and management of network infrastructure
• Designing, maintaining, and effectively operating Local Area Networks (LANs) and Wide Area Networks (WANs), Wireless, Internet Connectivity, and Network Security
• Prepare and ensure accuracy of documentation, procedure manuals, and help sheets for network installations, including data, voice, and video systems.
• Assist in development of business continuity and disaster-recovery plans, and maintain current knowledge of the plan. Respond to emergency network outages in accordance with business continuity and disaster-recovery plans
• Performs other duties as assigned
• This position will require an onsite presence and 80% local travel, as it will be supporting our utilities in the Greater Indianapolis Area

Job Requirements

Required Qualifications:

• Four-year degree with emphasis in Computer Science, Computer Technology, MIS or equivalent experience.
• Minimum 5 years of designing and supporting network devices and network protocols (Network switches, Firewalls, Wireless controllers and APs, BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, SIP and layer 2 protocols Spanning Tree, VPC, VDC and VTP).
• Experience with Watchgaurd Firewall, Active Directory, NPS, and RADIUS configurations
• Good interpersonal skills to interact with customers and team members
• Strong organization skills to balance and prioritize work
• Ability to work independently and as part of a team

Database Management and complete DATA BASE ORIENTATION OF CLIENTS IN THE SOFTWARE SYSTEMS AND PUNCHING THE DATA INTO THE SOFTWARE ASSIGNED.

-Troubleshoot and resolve all problems encountered with hardware and software.

-Laptop, MAC pcs, Troubleshoot and resolve firewall, desktop, hardware, connection, printer, and software issues.

-Update network applications as required. Maintain daily tape backup and off-site tape storage

Administration of all networks, servers, and storage infrastructure to Build, test, implement, operate, patch, monitor, backup, update, and secure

-Hardware / Software configuration of Servers, Switches, Routers, Firewalls, and storage system

Maximize corporate network services uptime by maintaining the corporate network, server, and storage infrastructure

-Maintain and manage VPNs and routers and Troubleshoot Management of personal queries

Provide Mobile device support and Maintain all the devices and regular check of the personal devices of the Management and Employees.

Desired Candidate Profile: 

-Outstanding organizational and time management skills, Analytical thinker, and problem solver. Attention to detail is Crucial.

-Experienced Symantec Antivirus/Cisco VPN solutions, Hands on experience in networking, routing and switching, and Administration

-In-depth knowledge of best practices around management, control, and monitoring of server infrastructure.    

Installation, Configuration and Troubleshooting of Network Equipment e.g CCTV Camera, Network Switch, Router, Wi-fi, Server and Desktop computer etc. Willing to travel entire India based on project requirement.

• Support for Incident and Request management tasks as assigned.
• Administration and understanding of the following network services to support Incident and Request tasks as assigned:
• Palo Alto Firewalls
• LAN Routing and Switching
• Microsoft Azure Networking – Vnets, Express Route, Vnet Peering, VPN Gateways
• LAN to LAN VPN Tunnels
• Arista Network devices
• Work with Networking Monitoring tools such as one or more of the following: Solar Winds, Splunk, Prime, NetMRI, Nagios
• Work directly with telecom carriers and Network infrastructure maintenance providers as needed, such as Verizon, Tata, Bharti, and Cisco.
• Maximize network performance by monitoring performance, troubleshooting network problems and outages, scheduling upgrades, and collaborating with network architects on network optimization
• Supports routing and switching and work on BGP, OSPF protocols
• Support China retail store infrastructure and data center through on-call rotations

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Graduate or above
• 6-7 years experience in LAN/WAN Routing including 2 or more years of LAN/WAN Administration experience within a multi-platform technical environment.
• In-depth understanding of voice and/or data technologies and subject matter expert in at least one area.
• Cisco Certified or equivalent combination of knowledge and experience.
• Understanding on IPsec, VPNs, GRE, NAT/PAT over varied platforms
• Expert knowledge of all LAN switching technologies eg Spanning Tree, VLAN management, and VTP concepts on Cisco, Nexus, and Arista
• Good understanding of MPLS routing and OSPF routing

As an IT Infrastructure Architects design and implement information systems that support an enterprise infrastructure. You will provide the necessary technical infrastructure for the development of new and existing infrastructure technologies and system requirements. 

Improve efficiency and streamline operations. enhance design specs, create technical documentation, implement control concepts and deliver expected outcomes. Collect performance data to monitor systems resource usage and failures rates and provide solutions and recommend changes. ensure scalability and anticipate capacity growth through careful planning and awareness of industry, business and client’s growth trends. Design activities rely on accurate data, sensible KPIs and performance metrics to improve processes and bridge gaps

Primary Responsibilities:

Conducting research on emerging and existing technologies. Recommend system alternative technologies and infrastructure development efforts that increase infrastructure flexibility, reliability, stability, scalability, resilience, availability, performance and cost effectiveness. All collective research efforts will contribute to the creation of architectural road maps that leverage software and cloud technologies. Research customer interaction, policy adherence, enterprise processes. May act as the subject matter expert of architectural virtualization.

Needs to guide in execution of Incident, Change, Release, Problem, Performance, and Availability Management

Security of all infrastructure is of paramount importance and is periodically audited, monitored and updated in keeping up with latest threats and risks.

Identifying best practices for future implementation. Architects provide feedback to the enterprise and incorporate all gathered information into future integration plans.

Provides DevOps thought leadership and mentoring in both advisory and delivery contexts, focusing on the requirements of Technology and Business and how these are best served by continuous improvements to our delivery approach

Required Technical skills and Experience

• Over 10+ years of experience as IT Infrastructure Architect
• Bachelor / Masters Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or related field
• Must have experience in Infrastructure architecting on AWS/ Azure/ Google cloud.
• Should have a very good understanding of Cloud Native services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) platforms for application deployment and scalability in a cost effective manner, addresses scalability, availability, service continuity (DR), performance and security requirements. auto-scaling and self-healing.
• Has hands on experience with cloud orchestration using Kubernetes or apache Mesos on marathon would be an advantage
• Evangelizing microservices-based architectures using containerized applications; help to drive strategy and implementation of cloud native infrastructure
• Sound Knowledge of RDBMS, preferably with MYSQL Mongo, Elasticsearch, Redis. Working knowledge of, CDN/WAF 
• Proven expertise on Linux, and DevOps tools such as Git, Jenkings, maven, Bamboo Docker, Puppet, Ansible,Kubernetes,terraform. Elastic Beanstalk, Openshift
• Infrastructure security (VPC, tunneling, API management, Governance) and networking security solutions like routing, switching, Firewalls etc.
• Good debugging skills on Linux, Apache, Nginx, PHP, MYSQL and cloud-based application and administration of RHEL, CentOS/Ubuntu
• Experience in Cloud scale APM and Monitoring Tools such as ELK ,Splunk, Nagios, Graffana, XMON Datadog, Dynatrace, Appdynamics, Cloud Monitoring.
• Troubleshoot and debug environment and infrastructure problems found in the production and non-production environments.
• Implements security improvements by assessing current situations; evaluating trends; anticipating requirements.
• Determines security violations and inefficiencies by conducting periodic audits.
• Upgrades system by implementing and maintaining security controls.
• Must have knowledge of leading storage backup solutions.
• Experience with one or more Unix shell scripting languages (Bash, C-Shell)

• Team mentoring and support for ramping up new engineers
• Provide leadership in planning, defining requirements, scoping efforts, and setting appropriate milestones
• Using a data-driven process/mindset, author technical content to support the incident response process (e.g. postmortem/root cause analysis) and develop interim solutions to prevent or quickly resolve issues/problems the next time.
• Experience with networking technologies (routing, switching, IP addressing, DNS, Load balancers, etc.) Knowledge of :  - File systems, NFS, CIFS, iSCSI - IPv4 networking, including TCP/IP, SMTP/POP/ IMAP, HTTP/S, LDAP – DNS
• Ability to work independently while tackling complex problems
• Passionate to palm ownership and responsibility of the systems - 24x7