Senior Systems Engineer

UMass Amherst • Amherst, NY

3d • Hybrid

About The Position

This position will lead the implementation, monitoring, and continuous improvement of automation procedures and resource optimization strategies for on-premises virtualization platforms and enable hybrid cloud connectivity. This role ensures high-quality, professional technology services to the UMass Amherst campus community, including executives, faculty, staff, and administrators. Provide expert mentorship and training to IT system administrators on virtualization architecture and best practices. This role focuses on managing virtualization clusters, storage, backup, and compute resources, while ensuring high availability and disaster recovery across multi-site environments. The position also supports hybrid cloud integration and resource extension between on-prem and cloud platforms.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree with 7 years related professional experience OR associate’s degree with 9 years related professional experience.
• Three (3) years managing systems and services in a large complex environment.
• Knowledge of virtualization clusters, storage, backup, and compute resources across on-premises environments, ensuring high availability and disaster recovery for critical systems.
• Knowledge and experience with system scripting using technologies such as PowerShell, MS Graph, Python, PHP, and Bash or similar.
• Advanced knowledge and experience working with virtualization environments and tools such as VMWare or Nutanix.
• Experience with automation products, such as Jenkins, Terraform, Ansible or GIT.
• Advanced knowledge and experience with industry standard datacenter or cloud best-practices related to deployment, provisioning, and pipelining.
• Experience in Windows/Linux including TCP/IP and Basic Networking
• Excellent analytical, documentation, and organizational skills to plan, recommend, implement, and monitor effective and efficient processes and to identify problems and implement solutions.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills.
• Ability to work independently with minimal guidance.
• Experience planning and working on highly complex and major projects requiring innovative and original solutions.

Nice To Haves

• Senior level experience working in a large complex educational environment a plus.
• Senior level experience and certification with Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud.
• Senior level experience with database management systems such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MS SQL Server.
• Senior level experience with centralized automated configuration management and provisioning solutions for Windows/Linux systems such as Intune, MS GPO, KACE and JAMF or RedHat Satellite, Puppet, or Ansible.
• Senior level experience working in a team-based environment and a proven history of implementing cross-departmental initiatives.
• Good communication and people skills, participation in on-call rotation, strong analytical skills, organized, responsive, and thorough.

Responsibilities

• Lead and contribute work on multiple projects as a project leader to research, propose and implement strategies in automation, migration, and consolidation of complex distributed enterprise-wide systems and services, converting or migrating physical servers to virtual machines and handling migrations between multi-site on-prem and hybrid environments using enterprise virtualization, hyperconverged infrastructure, and hybrid cloud extension technologies.
• Architect, develop, and oversee automation of infrastructure solutions across on-premises environments.
• Drive the design of scalable, secure, and highly available systems for hybrid deployments, while mentoring team members and establishing best practices for infrastructure automation.
• Lead cross-functional collaboration to architect and integrate systems orchestration into CI/CD pipelines, leveraging automation tools to design scalable, automated deployment workflows for on-premises and hybrid systems.
• Champion best practices that enable development teams to deliver code efficiently and reliably through a robust, industry-standard pipeline.
• Lead analysis, monitoring, and keeping systems current with changing technologies for the campus community.
• Lead and contribute to developing and implementing best practices for automating the provisioning, configuration, and maintaining new and existing software/services for the campus community.
• Lead and contribute to the management of multiple database instances in support of various applications.
• Oversee and maintain enterprise infrastructure components, such as virtualization platforms, storage systems, backup solutions, and compute resources, to ensure optimal performance, reliability, and business continuity.
• Oversee the monitoring and analysis of system and application performance to proactively identify bottlenecks and optimize resource allocation, ensuring efficient and equitable access for the campus community.
• Lead the implementation of automated deployment and configuration changes across development, staging, and production environments, driving consistency, reliability, and operational excellence across the on-premises infrastructure lifecycle.
• Respond to system alerts and user-reported issues by applying advanced troubleshooting techniques to diagnose and resolve complex problems.
• Lead the refinement of incident response practices through documentation and knowledge sharing.
• Lead and contribute to the development of tools for automation of tasks and integration of other central IT services.
• Collaborate on best practices for automation and improvements, document best practices and procedures.
• Lead and contribute implementation efforts to secure systems by following Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) best practices, and government/compliance requirements (such as NIST 800-53, NIST 800-171).
• Lead in the planning of both short and long-term on-premises cloud and virtualization goals and directions for UMass IT.
• Performs related duties as assigned or required to meet Department, Executive Area/Division, and University goals and objectives.
• Provide consulting to IT and other campus staff on matters related to system provisioning and centralized maintenance and monitoring.
• Perform miscellaneous related duties as required.

Benefits

• This position has the opportunity for a hybrid work schedule
• subject to the terms and conditions of the Professional Staff Union collective bargaining agreement.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree