System Administrator

Illinois State • Normal, IL

5d • Hybrid

About The Position

The System Administrator works with 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. 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. Technology Infrastructure and Research Computing (TIRC) 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, TIRC provides networking infrastructure and delivers audio and video communication capabilities to campus.

Requirements

• Five years of progressively more responsible work experience in an Information Technology related profession.
• Four years of work experience with both Windows and Linux systems, including a minimum of 2 years of hands-on Linux server administration.
• Two years of work experience with automation tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, or Salt.
• Two years of work experience with Git-based version control tools such as GitLab, GitHub, or Bitbucket.
• 30 semester hours of college coursework in Information Technology, IT Management, or closely related field substitutes for 12 months of experience.
• 60 semester hours of college coursework in Information Technology, IT Management, or closely related field substitutes for 18 months of experience.
• 90 semester hours of college coursework in Information Technology, IT Management, or closely related field substitutes for 24 months of experience.
• Bachelor's or higher degree in Information Technology, IT Management, or closely related field substitutes for 36 months of experience.

Nice To Haves

• Valid state of Illinois driver's license.
• Ability to accurately define incidents, problems, and events in the trouble ticketing system.
• Ability to develop, update, and/or maintain standard operating procedures (SOPs).
• Ability to operate common network tools (e.g., ping, traceroute, nslookup, wireshark).
• Ability to collaborate effectively with others.
• Ability to function effectively in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.
• Ability to autonomously navigate complex technical documentation and leverage modern research tools (including AI and LLMs) to independently synthesize and validate solutions for infrastructure and automation challenges without external guidance.
• Knowledge of cybersecurity and privacy principles.
• Knowledge of measures or indicators of system performance and availability.
• Knowledge of server and client operating systems.
• Knowledge of systems administration concepts.
• Knowledge of virtualization technologies and virtual machine development and maintenance.
• Knowledge of operating system command-line tools.
• Knowledge of network protocols such as TCP/IP, Dynamic Host Configuration, Domain Name System (DNS), and directory services.
• Knowledge of configuration management.
• Knowledge of directory services (e.g., Microsoft Active Directory, LDAP, etc.).
• Skill in diagnosing connectivity problems.
• Skill in using virtual machines (e.g., Microsoft Hyper-V, VMWare vSphere, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Amazon EC2 and Azure Virtual Machines, etc.).
• Ability to create and develop code around automating IT infrastructure and configuration using Automation solutions.
• Skill in interfacing with customers.
• Skill in correcting physical and technical problems that impact system/server performance.
• Skill in identifying and anticipating system/server performance, availability, capacity, or configuration problems.
• Skill in recovering failed systems/servers (e.g., recovery software, failover clusters, replication, etc.).
• Cloud Computing experience (Amazon AWS, Azure, etc.).
• Experience with load balancing & application delivery controllers (e.g. Citrix NetScaler, A10 Thunder, Haproxy).
• Experience with Kubernetes container deployment and orchestration.

Responsibilities

• Develop automated processes leveraging Infrastructure/Config as Code principles around new and existing services.
• Configure network flows for critical IT services, managing configuration for virtual IP addresses, content switching rules, health checks, and backend servers.
• Serve as the primary systems administrator for File Transfer Service, Proxy Services, and other enterprise IT Infrastructure.
• Contribute to capacity planning, patching, performance tuning, configuration, security hardening, documentation, and troubleshooting for responsible services.
• Leverage traditional monitoring and time series metric aggregation approaches to enhance observability and instrumentation around the health and usage of services.
• Assist in continuous improvement and innovation to enhance customer experience and modernization across information technology infrastructure.

Benefits

• Insurance benefits , including health, dental, vision, and life
• Retirement and supplemental retirement planning options
• Tuition waiver benefits available to staff as well as their eligible dependents
• Paid holiday / administrative closures during Thanksgiving and Winter Breaks
• Paid benefit time

What This Job Offers

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