Senior System Administrator: Office of Innovative Technologies - UTK

Responsibilities

• Lead strategic planning, architecture, and lifecycle management of Microsoft SQL Server environments.
• Design, implement, and maintain high availability solutions, including: Always On Availability Groups, Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), and disaster recovery architectures across multi-datacenter environments.
• Manage SQL Server installations, upgrades, patching, and migrations.
• Monitor, tune, and optimize database performance for high-throughput applications.
• Implement and maintain database security, encryption, and compliance standards.
• Develop automation for routine DBA tasks, monitoring, and alerting.
• Lead cross-functional projects with DBAs, developers, and application teams to deploy and upgrade critical systems.
• Support University-wide and departmental shared database services impacting high-availability applications.
• Provide database expertise for application performance tuning, especially for data warehousing and reporting systems.
• Collaborate with vendors and internal stakeholders to enhance application and database functionality.

Qualifications

• Required Qualifications:
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent experience.
• Experience: 5+ years of hands-on experience administering Microsoft SQL Server in enterprise environments with a Bachelor’s degree, or 9 years of experience with an Associate’s degree, or 13 years of experience with a High School diploma.
• Knowledge, Skills, Abilities: Expertise in high availability and disaster recovery design, strong leadership and project coordination skills, excellent troubleshooting and problem-solving abilities, effective communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders, ability to mentor and guide cross-functional team.
• Preferred Qualifications: Experience in higher education or large enterprise environments, knowledge of data warehousing and reporting platforms, familiarity with cloud-based SQL solutions (Azure SQL, hybrid architectures), experience with monitoring tools (SolarWinds), Microsoft certifications (Azure DBA, SQL Server certifications).