Senior System Administrator

Position Overview

Raymour & Flanigan's Systems Team is seeking a Senior Systems Administrator to lead the design, implementation, administration, and modernization of enterprise datacenter infrastructure.

Essential Functions And Responsibilities

• Lead the design, implementation, administration, and modernization of enterprise datacenter infrastructure, including compute, storage, virtualization, application delivery, backup, and supporting systems platforms.
• Plan, coordinate, and perform system maintenance, software installations and upgrades, patch management, infrastructure lifecycle activities, and documentation.
• Design, deploy, manage, and troubleshoot enterprise storage platforms, including SAN, NAS, object storage, replication, snapshot, and backup-related technologies.
• Maintain strong working knowledge of storage protocols and access methods, including Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, SMB/CIFS, and S3-compatible object storage.
• Design, administer, and optimize enterprise virtualization and application provisioning platforms, including server virtualization, virtual desktop infrastructure, application delivery, and related management tools.
• Lead capacity planning, performance monitoring, availability analysis, and lifecycle planning for systems, storage, virtualization, and datacenter platforms.
• Conduct hardware and software research and evaluations to determine whether proposed solutions will deliver business value, improve reliability, reduce risk, and meet operational needs.
• Identify recurring operational challenges and develop creative, sustainable solutions that improve stability, efficiency, security, automation, and supportability.
• Serve as a senior technical escalation point for complex systems, storage, virtualization, application provisioning, access, performance, and availability issues.
• Mentor Systems Administrators and other technical team members by sharing knowledge, providing technical guidance, reviewing solutions, and helping develop team skills in datacenter, storage, virtualization, and automation disciplines.
• Support user and business needs, including troubleshooting, account maintenance, technical consultation, and training as appropriate.
• Maintain and monitor systems in a 24 x 7 environment to assure they are operating at optimal efficiency, availability, and performance.
• Establish system specifications by conferring with users, analyzing workflow, access, information, security, and operational requirements, and designing appropriate system infrastructure.
• Secure systems by developing system access, monitoring, control, evaluation, documentation, and continuous-improvement practices.
• Lead and participate in the conceptual phases of identifying and solving business problems and technology initiatives.
• Participate in disaster recovery and business continuity planning, documentation, testing, and execution for assigned systems and platforms.
• Update job knowledge by participating in educational opportunities; reading professional publications; maintaining personal networks; and participating in professional organizations.

Required Skills And Experience

• Associate or bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, System Administration, or a closely related field, or equivalent experience required.
• 8+ years of progressively responsible systems administration, infrastructure administration, or related enterprise technology experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, administering, and managing enterprise datacenter infrastructure.
• Extensive experience with enterprise virtualization platforms such as VMware vSphere, VMware Horizon, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, Azure Stack HCI, or equivalent technologies.
• Extensive experience with application provisioning, virtual desktop infrastructure, application delivery, and workload placement across on-premises and cloud-connected environments.
• Direct experience with enterprise storage platforms and technologies, including SAN, NAS, object storage, replication, snapshots, backup architectures, and storage capacity planning.
• Strong understanding of storage protocols including Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, SMB/CIFS, and S3-compatible object storage.
• Strong knowledge of systems and networking software, hardware, operating systems, networking protocols, security, storage, data protection, and disaster recovery practices.
• Experience with scripting, automation tools, infrastructure reporting, and repeatable operational processes.
• A proven history of developing and implementing IT strategy, infrastructure plans, lifecycle management practices, and technical standards.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects, coordinate technical efforts across teams, and influence infrastructure direction without requiring direct management authority.
• Experience mentoring administrators, engineers, and technical staff on systems, storage, virtualization, application provisioning, troubleshooting, and operational best practices.
• Demonstrated ability to develop and implement IT strategy, infrastructure plans, lifecycle management practices, and technical standards.
• Exceptional analytical, troubleshooting, debugging, and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent communication and documentation skills, including the ability to communicate effectively with IT team members, business stakeholders, vendors, internal customers, and technical teams.

Helpful Skills And Experience

• VMware, Citrix, Nutanix, Hyper-V, Azure Stack HCI, or equivalent virtualization and application delivery experience.
• Virtual desktop management and application provisioning experience.
• Microsoft Exchange or Exchange Online administration experience.
• IIS deployment and integration experience.
• Integration of business-related software and enterprise application platforms.
• Working knowledge of endpoint management, monitoring, and operations tools such as SCCM, SCOM, ManageEngine, SNMP, WMI, or equivalent technologies.
• Networking concepts, firewall coordination, load balancing, routing, switching, VLANs, and datacenter connectivity.
• Installation, configuration, and maintenance of virtualization clients, agents, management tools, and supporting infrastructure components.
• Email support systems such as spam filtering, archiving, retention, and mobile-device email access.
• Performance and utilization monitoring technologies such as SNMP and WMI.
• Microsoft SQL knowledge and experience a plus.
• Linux/Unix knowledge and experience a plus.
• Powershell, scripting, automation, and infrastructure-as-code experience a plus.