System Administrator

System Administrator

Job no : 519330

Work type : On Campus

Location : Normal, Illinois

Division Name : Finance and Planning

Department : Infrastructure Op & Networking

Job Summary

The Systems Administrator works within a team to develop, implement, maintain, optimize, and provide technical expertise and guidance for services around IT Automation, Load Balancing, and Application Delivery.

The incumbent, with an automation first mindset, will develop automated processes leveraging Infrastructure / Config as Code principles around new and existing services, that result in greater scalability, adaptability, time to resolution and increased efficiencies.

With a heavy focus on the institution's load balancing and Application Delivery Controllers a successful candidate will leverage and enhance their networking skillset as they work with IT staff across campus to configure network flows for critical IT services.

These network flows involve managing configuration for virtual IP addresses, content switching rules, health checks, and backend servers to meet a variety of application availability and resiliency use cases across the university's datacenter infrastructure, both on and off-site.

Additionally, this role will serve as the primary systems administrator for our File Transfer Service, Proxy Services, and other enterprise IT Infrastructure.

This Systems Administrator role will contribute to capacity planning, patching, performance tuning, configuration, security hardening, documentation, and troubleshooting for the services they are responsible for.

An individual in this role will leverage traditional monitoring and time series metric aggregation approaches to enhance observability and instrumentation around the health and usage of services the team is responsible for.

This role will assist in continuous improvement and innovation to enhance customer experience and modernization across our information technology infrastructure.

Additional Information

Technology Solutions provides information technology products and services for the administrative and business functions of Illinois State University.

Through our Technology Support Center and our highly trained staff, Technology Solutions looks to improve the campus experience for all students, faculty, staff, and the rest of the campus community.

Infrastructure Operations and Networking (ION) manages the physical server, virtualization, and storage infrastructure for the University along with offering communication and collaboration support in areas such as email, shared storage, and SharePoint.

Additionally, ION provides networking infrastructure and delivers audio and video communication capabilities to campus.

Position Highlights :

There is the potential for 100% remote work or a hybrid arrangement in this position, within the State of Illinois. Illinois residency is required.

Eligibility is based upon employee performance, appropriate remote working environment, and business needs.

University Benefit Highlights :

• Health, dental, vision, and life insurance
• Tuition waiver benefits are available to staff as well as their eligible dependents.
• Paid holiday / administrative closures during Thanksgiving and Winter Breaks
• Paid vacation and sick time
• Retirement and supplemental retirement
• For more University Benefit information :
• Information regarding eligibility for participation in the State Universities Retirement System and the State of Illinois Group Insurance program can be reviewed here :

Salary Rate / Pay Rate

$55,000 - $80,000 annual

Required Qualifications

Any combination totaling two years from the following categories :

a. Progressively more responsible work experience in IT related profession

b. College course work in Information Technology (IT), IT Management, or a closely related discipline, as measured by the following conversion table or its proportional equivalent :

• 60 semester hours or Associate's degree equals one year
• 90-120 semester hours or Bachelor's degree equals two years
• Work experience which included :

a. Two years (24 months) of demonstrated experience with hardware and software technology integration in large computing environments.

b. Actively working in server Systems Administration, specifically with Microsoft Windows Server and Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).

c. working with internal and external teams to develop, implement, and maintain hardware, software, and services.

Foundation qualification in Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) or ability to obtain within 12 months of hire.

Preferred Qualifications

Ability to :

a. accurately define incidents, problems, and events in the trouble ticketing system.

b. develop, update, and / or maintain standard operating procedures (SOPs).

c. operate common network tools (e.g., ping, traceroute, nslookup).

d. collaborate effectively with others.

e. function effectively in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.

Knowledge of :

a. cybersecurity and privacy principles.

b. measures or indicators of system performance and availability.

c. server and client operating systems.

d. systems administration concepts.

e. virtualization technologies and virtual machine development and maintenance.

f. operating system command-line tools.

g. network protocols such as TCP / IP, Dynamic Host Configuration, Domain Name System (DNS), and directory services.

h. configuration management

i. directory services. (e.g., Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP, etc.).

Skill in :

a. diagnosing connectivity problems.

b. using virtual machines. (e.g., Microsoft Hyper-V, VMWare vSphere, Citrix XenDesktop / Server, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, etc.).

c. Ability to create and develop code around automating IT infrastructure and configuration using Automation solutions.

d. interfacing with customers

e. correcting physical and technical problems that impact system / server performance.

f. identifying and anticipating system / server performance, availability, capacity, or configuration problems.

g. recovering failed systems / servers. (e.g., recovery software, failover clusters, replication, etc.).

h. Cloud Computing experience (Amazon AWS, Azure, etc.)

i. Experience with load balancing & application delivery controllers (e.g. Citrix NetScaler, A10 Thunder, Haproxy)

j. Experience with Kubernetes container deployment and orchestration

Work Hours

Core Hours : 8 : 00am-4 : 30pm Monday through Friday; occasional weekend and evening hours as business needs dictate

Functional Expectations

Must be able to complete the following with or without a reasonable accommodation :

• Remain at a workstation for extended periods.
• Distinguish colors on a monitor.
• Effectively communicate on a daily basis.
• Lift servers up to 45 pounds.

Proposed Starting Date

October 2024