Systems Administration Manager

Caltech is a world-renowned science and engineering institute that marshals some of the world's brightest minds and most innovative tools to address fundamental scientific questions. We thrive on finding and cultivating talented people who are passionate about what they do. Join us and be a part of the diverse Caltech community.

Job Summary

Manage IMSS's central open systems infrastructure team and collaborate with other groups within IMSS in addition to providing technical leadership. This person will be expected to work with other management, IT staff, customers, and technology partners to facilitate design, implementation, delivery, and management of services.

• Manages activities of staff and establish a strategic plan for open systems infrastructure team.
• Continue to improve team's operating procedures
• Collaborate with other IMSS teams and create win-win synergy opportunities among different teams.
• Take initiative and actively seek to expand the boundary of the team.
• Manages the design, development, and implementation of specific IT products and services that support the business operations of the Institute.
• Manages the overall life cycle of specific products and services, which includes but is not limited to analyzing requirements, formulating objectives and scope, planning, design, configuration, development, testing, deployment, and roll out.
• Manages the relationship with vendors of products that support multiple administrative departments; reviews contracts for vendor products and services; maintains knowledge on service level agreements with vendors.
• Responsible for all functional and technical issue resolution for specific IT products and services; and leads team members in the management and resolution of complex issues.

Essential Job Duties

• Lead the infrastructure team staff and coordinate/plan their activities.
• Continue to look for opportunities to improve operating procedures.
• Establish a strategic plan for the infrastructure team.
• Manage staff's activities and position them to align with the strategic plan.
• Lead the design of the server, network, and storage architecture for hardware, virtualized, and cloud-based infrastructures and application services.
• Work across organization to help develop solutions for management, monitoring, testing, backup, disaster recovery, etc.
• Act as a primary resource for technical issue escalation; provide guidance and technical mentoring to other systems administrators/consultants.
• Continually research emerging technologies and services to evaluate and determine value to IMSS and Caltech community.
• Help IMSS manage technology partners including SLAs and SLO review (in coordination with other groups at Caltech).
• Stay informed about various service models and delivery methods to allow IMSS to match them to specific project requirements and use cases.
• Capture emerging customer needs and translate them into new service offerings as appropriate.
• Participates in an on-call team rotation for off-hours support. Participates in scheduled off-hours maintenance windows. Some occasional off-hours work is required.
• Other duties as assigned.

Basic Qualifications

• B.S./B.A. degree or equivalent technical training.
• 5+ years of experience deploying and managing enterprise applications and services in mixed client environments.
• 5+ years of experience acting in a customer-facing, consultative capacity designing and supporting technology solutions.
• Excellent communications and interpersonal skills.
• Experience with capacity planning for large scale systems.
• Ability to work in a collaborative, team-based environment.
• Excellent troubleshooting, debugging, and diagnostic skills.
• Strong networking knowledge and skills.
• Hands on knowledge of high performance, low-cost infrastructure design in a virtual environment.
• Practical knowledge of cloud architectures including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.
• Understanding of modern IT production datacenter and managed hosting operations.
• Highly resourceful and adept at juggling multiple simultaneous projects.
• Firm grasp of database design and data management/replication architectures.
• Experience deploying and supporting enterprise management and monitoring tools.
• Must demonstrate ability to work effectively on independent, self-directed projects.

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous experience with cloud solution provider such as Amazon Web Services.
• Previous experience managing High Performance Computing clusters.

Required Documents

• Resume.