Systems Engineer - Information Technology

Join our team of difference makers•Azusa, CA

15h•$41 - $47

About The Position

APU seeks employees who desire to contribute to our thriving culture by cultivating community through professional interactions, demonstrating a posture of lifelong learning, and modeling Christ-like character. Working together, employees at APU commit to establishing a university atmosphere that is edifying to God and one another. You will be a part of the IT Engineering team, an agile development and operations unit responsible for the lifecycle development and support of core technology infrastructure for the University. Increasingly, you will be part of cross-functional teams bringing automation to systems supporting operations. A primary focus of this role will be the design, implementation, and management of our Kubernetes ecosystem, leveraging SUSE Rancher to unify multi-cluster operations across on-premises and cloud environments. You will be responsible for performing systems engineering for servers and integration middleware, always looking to increase standard and automated methods for scaling operations. Embracing continuous improvement, you intentionally design for reliability and availability of critical enterprise services. You should be a self-starter, problem solver, and have demonstrated proficiency of topics such as: large installation server administration, systems design, server operating systems, virtualization, clustered systems, storage platforms, cloud platforms, applications administration, scripting and automation, config management, logging and monitoring, identity and access management / directory services, and networking in a highly available cloud-native mission critical environment. As a Systems Engineer at APU, you will mentor junior and associate level administrators in the nuances of containerization and cloud-native best practices. You will provide guidance on solution designs and team-based oversight to ensure the quality and security of our K8s deployments. You are passionate about your field and press into innovative methods for systems engineering.

Requirements

Degree in Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, Mathematics, related degree, or demonstrable equivalent experience.
Three to five years of Systems Administration/Engineering, with proven abilities in full-stack devops engineering.
Experience in the disciplines listed in the summary above, and the skills below in a team-based environment.
Ability to solve problems quickly and automate processes.
Our team-based model requires initiative, good communication skills, the ability to work on multiple efforts concurrently, and the desire to learn multiple disciplines.
Mastered Systems Engineering disciplines.
Learn new technologies in support of the disciplines described above, as well as emerging integration patterns and DevOps models for operational efficiency, availability, and performance.
Ability to manage Linux and Windows and virtualization and containerized servers in an enterprise environment.
A solid understanding of operating systems in general; understands paging and swapping, inter-process communications, devices and what device drivers do, file system concepts, and can use performance analysis to tune systems.
Cloud Providers (e.g. Amazon AWS, Azure etc.).
Scripting in various languages: Python, Bash, PowerShell, Perl etc. (especially in relation to config management Ansible playbooks).
Ability to manage server hardware and infrastructure hardware in an enterprise-class datacenter environment.
Ability to manage a virtual infrastructure for hosting virtualized desktops and virtualized servers.
Ability to manage various storage technologies including SAN, NAS, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, clustering file systems, Cloud block/file, and storage operating systems.
Strong understanding of Apache, IIS, Tomcat, VMware, SMTP Servers (postfix, sendmail, etc.)
Installation and maintenance of database platforms: (Oracle, Postgres, MySQL, MSSQL).
Strong understanding of the following protocols: HTTP, SFTP, DNS, LDAP, IMAP, SMTP, SSL, SSH, SMB, NFS.
Knowledge of LAN/WAN technologies and protocols.
Expertise in deploying and managing Kubernetes clusters at scale; experience with SUSE Rancher for centralized multi-cluster management and provisioning is highly desirable.
Requires excellent analytical and problem-solving skills.
Level of Independence: In order to function effectively, this person must have a high level of independence, show a high level of initiative, have the ability to make decisions, and be highly motivated.
To enable IT services to operate normally at all times, this person is required to be available by telephone for management, consultation, and liaison with support, development and technical staff after normal working hours and on weekends.
Ability to lift, pull, grasp, bend.
Ability to lift up to 50 lbs.
Repetitive keyboard work.
Computer monitor and reading.

Nice To Haves

RHCE Certification and/or MCSE/Microsoft Solutions Architect Expert is nice to have.

Responsibilities

Build and maintain configuration scripts/playbooks/images for rapid deployment of systems.
Design, document, and implement solutions for providing various types of high availability systems.
Manage Linux and Windows system hosts and clusters in a virtual environment (VmWare).
Continuous integration and deployment of application and infrastructure code, configuration, etc from development through to production.
Build, design and deploy servers (physical, virtual, and cloud), as needed.
Automate routine server software maintenance, patching, and performance tuning to ensure optimal performance and availability.
Perform benchmarking, tuning, capacity planning for systems and applications.
Perform direct and indirect monitoring and log analysis, as well as establish thresholds for automated alerts and notifications or triggers.
Deploy, manage, and troubleshoot common application stacks (e.g. App, Web, Database).
Promote, identify and uphold security practices for applications and systems. (e.g. SELinux, iptables, windows firewall, antivirus)
Configure and allocate cross-platform storage to infrastructure. And maintain storage replication and snapshots, or whatever means necessary to allow for recovery.
Maintain enterprise and systems directories (OpenLDAP, Active Directory) for both client/server systems management and authentication, authorization, group, and attribute services.
Research and recommend new technology, services, applications and procedures for long-term server infrastructure and application optimization.
Respond quickly to service disruptions according to on-call schedule, updating according to protocol, and documenting the event, participating in positive post-mortems, and determining root cause, and resultant service improvements.
Container Orchestration: Perform systems engineering for server environments and integration middleware, with a specific focus on Kubernetes cluster lifecycle management.
Rancher Administration: Utilize SUSE Rancher to streamline cluster deployments, manage security policies, and provide centralized visibility into containerized workloads.
Scalability & Reliability: Design for high availability and reliability of critical enterprise services, ensuring that microservices architectures are robust and self-healing.
Automation-First Mindset: Increase standard and automated methods for scaling operations via Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and CI/CD pipelines for container deployments.
Other duties as assigned.