Senior Systems Administrator

The Position

The City: 
Carlsbad is conveniently located between L.A. and San Diego and features nearly seven miles of coastline, three lagoons, world-class resorts, well-planned neighborhoods and a diverse business community.  Covering nearly 40 square miles, the City of Carlsbad is currently home to about 115,000 residents. Thanks to an award-winning growth management plan, the city's infrastructure and services keep pace with development and promote an excellent quality of life.
 
A full-service city, Carlsbad has its own police and fire services, a water district, parks and recreation, and library and cultural arts departments, in addition to standard administrative and public works functions.  
The Position: 
The primary purpose of this role is to use experience and expertise to resolve technical problems and design new solutions relating to information technology systems and systems infrastructure.

*This position is eligible for a hybrid working schedule.
 
The Senior System Administrator is responsible for overseeing a team in effectively obtaining, installing, configuring, operating, and maintaining systems hardware and software and related IT infrastructure.  This role leads technical research and development to enable continuing innovation of the technology infrastructure.  The Senior System Administrator ensures that system hardware, operating systems, software systems, and related procedures adhere to best practice and organizational values, as well as that these systems support staff, volunteers, and partners in effectively using the city's virtual and cloud computing infrastructure.
 
The Senior System Administrator oversees project teams in the initiation and planning phases of project management methodology.  These activities include the definition of needs, benefits, and technical strategy; research & development within the project implementation and management life-cycle; technical analysis and design; and support of operations staff in executing, testing and rolling-out solutions.  Oversight of projects is focused on smoothing the transition of projects from development staff to production staff by performing operations activities within the project implementation and management life-cycle.
 
The Senior System Administrator oversees development, configuration, deployment and maintenance of the enterprise systems to avoid interruptions in services and supervises the work of less experienced team members or project teams.

Key Responsibilities

The following duties are typical for this role.  Incumbents may not perform all of the listed duties and/or may be required to perform additional duties from those listed below to meet the city's business needs and changing operating practices and overall technological trends.  Other duties may be required and assigned.  After hours support and participation in on-call rotations required.  
 
Senior Systems Administrator: 
 

• Determines, translates and programs business needs and issues into appropriate system to resolve end user requests.
• Plans, configures, and maintains system infrastructure for the city.
• Oversees implementation of system security.
• Performs the role of lead or supervisor; assigns work; distributes workload; authorizes timesheets; assists in recruitment processes and participates in performance reviews.
• Participates in long-range strategic system planning.
• Provides input for developing department policies.
• Manages others to resolve system problems.
• Oversees monitoring, installation, testing, configuration and troubleshooting of hardware and software and system or application upgrades.
• Oversees preventative system maintenance schedules.
• Oversees troubleshooting on security and enterprise systems.
• Provides oversight of evaluation, selection, acquisition and implementation of computer hardware and software.
• Provides technical training to end users.
• Engineering of system administration-related solutions for various project and operational needs.
• Oversees care of new and existing servers including: hardware, peripherals, services, settings, directories, storage, etc. in accordance with standards and project or operational requirements.
• Develops server specifications, performs capacity planning and installation of server hardware and software.
• Installs configures and maintains server operating systems, applies OS patches and upgrades on a regular basis.
• Plans, installs and maintains server and application virtualization technologies including VMWare, Citrix and HyperV.
• Develops enterprise storage system specification, and provides planning and implementation of storage systems.
• Plans, implements and manages cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) strategies and contracts for services.
• Manages contracts and service level agreements from third party system infrastructure providers.
• Oversees mobile device management (MDM) systems, enables MDM policies for BYOD and city issued devices, ensures secure access to city's information from mobile devices.
• Oversees installation and configuration procedures.
• Oversees maintenance of system standards and policies.
• Research and recommend innovative (and where possible automated) approaches for system administration tasks.  Identify approaches that leverage resources and provide economies of scale.
• Oversees daily system monitoring and regular security monitoring
• Plans, implements and maintains enterprise backup systems. Oversees daily backup operations, ensuring all required file systems, database and application data are successfully backed up.
• Oversees enterprise applications including email, unified communications and collaboration, presence and instant messaging systems.
• Manages and maintains system infrastructure services including Active Directory (AD), domain controllers, domain name services (DNS), antivirus and security systems, enterprise printing services, and server management and monitoring tools.
• Oversees conference room video conferencing, telepresence and collaboration systems.
• Supervise others in system failure recovery efforts; coordinate communication with impacted end users.
• Oversees upgrade and configuration of system software.
• Integrates and maps business needs and strategies of internal and external customers and maps into technology system infrastructure and solutions.
• Designs Disaster Recovery and business continuity strategies including planning and installation of DR systems for critical city business applications and data.
• Responds to and executes electronic discovery jobs for information pertaining to legal matters and public records requests.
• Conducts request for proposals, purchasing of hardware and software supplies and negotiates with vendors.
• Leads and manages technology vendors in the scope of assigned work for the City of Carlsbad.
• Oversees establishing technology user policies and procedures.
• Participates in budget planning.

Qualifications

• Knowledge of encryption technologies such as bitlocker.
• Knowledge of Microsoft Windows Operating Systems: Windows 7\10, Windows Servers, Windows Active Directory, Windows Server GPO`s/PowerShell, Office 365.
• Knowledge of computer system operations: VMWare; Storage including: DELL\EMC, NETAPP/Tegile/IBM, CITRIX, Cloud Services-AWS/AZURE/Century Link; Disaster Recovery-Veeam/SafeHaven; Antivirus Systems; Printing Services; Backup and Restore systems that support IT infrastructures and Application systems that support City of Carlsbad.
• Knowledge of infrastructure services including Active Directory (AD), AD group policies, domain controllers, Directory Sync and Active Directory Federation Services, DNS, DHCP, WINS SNMP, SMTP, POP3 and iMAP.
• Knowledge of Unified communications and collaboration solutions.
• Knowledge of scripting, windows command line and PowerShell commands.
• Knowledge of general e-mail and other collaboration technologies. 
• Knowledge of network servers, storage systems and maintenance.
• Knowledge of network connectivity.
• Ability to perform systems administration tasks on servers, storage systems and enterprise applications.
• Ability to investigate, troubleshoot and resolve issues.
• Ability to perform basic purchasing.
• Ability to work independently with occasional supervision.
• Ability to implement and maintain backup technologies and repair and recover from hardware or software failures.
• Ability to design, plan and manage virtualization environments.
• Ability to provide effective customer service.
• Ability to establish and maintain effective and cooperative working relationships with city employees and the public.
• Ability to work well as part of a team.
• Ability to communicate well both in writing and verbally.
• Knowledge of Microsoft clustering.
• Knowledge of directories, group policies, file systems, domains and protocols.
• Broad knowledge of multiple technologies, servers, storage and security at the enterprise level.
• Working knowledge of information security principles and practices.
• Knowledge of principles and practice of project management.
• Ability to investigate and troubleshoot complex issues
• Ability to perform purchasing and prepare request for proposals and scope of work.
• Ability to implement backup technologies and repair and recover from hardware or software failures.
• Ability to negotiate with vendors on pricing and terms and conditions.
• Ability to develop and maintain systems standards and best practices.
• Deep working knowledge of information security principles and practices.

Experience & Education

Requires a bachelor's (4-year) degree, with a technical major, such as engineering or computer science, management information systems, information technology or a related discipline, or equivalent experience.
 
Systems Administration/System Engineer certification in Microsoft and VMware.