Senior System Administrator: Office of Innovative Technologies - UTK

University of Tennessee•Knoxville, TN

16h•Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Microsoft SQL Server Database Administrator (DBA) to lead the design, implementation, and support of enterprise database environments supporting mission-critical university systems. This role has a strong emphasis on High Availability (HA), Always On Availability Groups, and cluster management supporting applications essential to university operations. This position plays a subject expert role, partnering with system administrators, developers, and vendors to ensure database platforms are secure, scalable, resilient, and optimized for performance.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent experience.
5+ years of hands-on experience administering Microsoft SQL Server in enterprise environments with Bachelors’ degree OR 9 years of experience with associate’s degree OR 13 years of experience with a high school diploma.
Expertise in high availability and disaster recovery design.
Strong leadership and project coordination skills.
Excellent troubleshooting and problem-solving abilities.
Effective communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Ability to mentor and guide cross-functional teams.
Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis without need now or in the future for sponsorship for employment-based visa status.

Nice To Haves

Experience in higher education or large enterprise environments.
Knowledge of data warehousing and reporting platforms.
Familiarity with cloud-based SQL solutions (Azure SQL, hybrid architectures).
Experience with monitoring tools (SolarWinds).
Microsoft certifications (Azure DBA, SQL Server certifications).

Responsibilities

Lead strategic planning, architecture, and lifecycle management of Microsoft SQL Server environments.
Design, implement, and maintain high availability solutions, including: Always On Availability Groups, Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), Disaster recovery architectures across multi-datacenter environments.
Manage SQL Server installations, upgrades, patching, and migrations.
Monitor, tune, and optimize database performance for high-throughput applications.
Implement and maintain database security, encryption, and compliance standards.
Develop automation for routine DBA tasks, monitoring, and alerting.
Lead cross-functional projects with DBAs, developers, and application teams to deploy and upgrade critical systems.
Support University-wide and departmental shared database services impacting high-availability applications.
Provide database expertise for application performance tuning, especially for data warehousing and reporting systems.
Collaborate with vendors and internal stakeholders to enhance application and database functionality.
Lead implementation, integration, and patching of complex vendor applications in multi-server and multi-datacenter environments.
Design and support secure application integrations using modern authentication and networking standards.
Work with vendors to improve application features and system performance.
Mentor system administrators and application teams on best practices.