Sr. Systems Engineer-IBM i, AIX, Storage, and Backup

Performive LLC • Marietta, GA

116d • $100,000 - $125,000 • Remote

About The Position

CloudFirst is seeking a Senior Systems Engineer to support IBM i, AIX, storage, backup, and high-availability environments. The role maintains, monitors, and supports IBM Power Systems and related infrastructure, and serves as a technical liaison among IT Infrastructure, Service Delivery, and Sales. The engineer evaluates upcoming implementations and advises on implementation strategy, solution supportability, operational readiness, and long-term infrastructure reliability.

The position includes administration of IBM i and AIX systems; IBM Power hardware, HMC, and PowerVM; enterprise storage and SAN infrastructure; and backup, disaster recovery, and high-availability solutions. The engineer also monitors infrastructure security, recommends improvements to security and resilience, provides after-hours support for emergencies and scheduled work, and creates and maintains technical documentation. The position is remote and based in the United States.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business, or a related field; equivalent experience may be considered.
• 10+ years of hands-on experience supporting IBM Power Systems environments.
• Strong experience with IBM i and VIOS installation, administration, configuration, maintenance, and upgrades.
• Experience installing, configuring, and managing high-availability solutions such as MIMIX, PowerHA, SAN replication, and related technologies.
• Advanced IBM i administration, including PTF management, system sizing, performance monitoring, and hardware upgrade planning.
• Knowledge of IBM i work management, including subsystems, job queues, user profiles, class objects, and system values optimization.
• Experience with IBM i security hardening, object authority, audit controls, and compliance requirements such as SOX and PCI-DSS.
• Working knowledge of Db2 for i, SQL-based performance analysis, journaling, and commitment control.
• Full-lifecycle AIX administration, including NIM-based installation, patching, Technology Level upgrades, configuration, and operating system hardening.
• Advanced AIX LVM skills, including physical volumes, volume groups, logical volumes, and JFS2 file systems.
• Experience using NMON, topas, vmstat, iostat, and sar to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks.
• Comprehensive experience with enterprise IBM Power Systems hardware and components.
• Senior-level proficiency managing HMC environments, including creation and configuration and dynamic allocation of LPAR CPU, memory, and I/O resources.
• In-depth understanding of PowerVM, including VIOS, NPIV, vSCSI, and Live Partition Mobility.
• Experience configuring, tuning, and maintaining dual or redundant VIOS environments; mapping Fibre Channel to LPARs; and migrating active partitions between hosts.
• Experience managing enterprise clustering and high-availability environments, including PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX and IBM i.
• Experience with architecture, zoning, provisioning, and replication for enterprise storage platforms, including IBM FlashSystem, SAN Volume Controller, Dell EMC, and NetApp.
• Ability to design and manage Fibre Channel networks and administer Brocade or Cisco MDS fabrics.
• Experience managing storage pools, thin provisioning, deduplication, replication, and FlashCopy technologies.
• Advanced experience with native backup and recovery utilities, including mksysb and savevg for AIX and full system saves for IBM i.
• Experience architecting and managing IBM BRMS policy configuration, media management, automation, and daily operational processes.
• Experience administering physical and virtual tape libraries, enterprise tape systems, and SAN-level replication technologies such as Global Mirror and Metro Mirror.
• Proficiency writing operational scripts using KornShell, Bash, Perl, or Python.
• Working knowledge of ITIL service management practices, particularly incident, problem, and change management.
• Ability to work independently with limited supervision and collaborate effectively within a team.
• Excellent interpersonal, verbal, and written communication skills.
• Detail-oriented, organized, proactive, and able to follow through and manage time effectively.
• Ability to prioritize competing demands in a fast-paced technical environment.
• Strong work ethic and commitment to teamwork, accountability, and high-quality service delivery.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with configuration management tools such as Ansible for IBM Power environments is preferred.
• Equivalent experience may be considered in place of the stated bachelor’s degree.

Responsibilities

• Maintain, monitor, and support IBM Power Systems, IBM i, AIX, storage, backup, and related data center infrastructure.
• Act as a technical liaison among IT Infrastructure, Service Delivery, and Sales to evaluate upcoming implementations and confirm ongoing solution supportability.
• Monitor infrastructure security, identify risks or gaps, and recommend improvements to security posture and operational resilience.
• Install, configure, and manage IBM Power Systems high-availability solutions, including PowerHA, MIMIX, host-based replication products, and SAN replication technologies.
• Provide after-hours support for infrastructure emergencies, scheduled maintenance, upgrades, and critical incident response.
• Develop and maintain technical documentation, including project plans, operating procedures, runbooks, network diagrams, and scopes of work.
• Perform other related duties as assigned by management.
• Design, maintain, and execute disaster recovery and bare-metal restore plans supporting defined recovery time and recovery point objectives.
• Serve as a senior technical escalation resource, create documentation and runbooks, and mentor junior administrators.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior