Senior Systems Administrator

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.

About the Role

Provide solution architect functions, including architecting and designing solutions, planning and organizing new software installations, upgrades to operating systems and layered software packages, and ensuring security of data and networks. Forecast future architect function needs.

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy scalable, highly available, fault-tolerant, and reliable systems.
• Formulate the design of server, network, and storage architecture for hardware, virtualized, and cloud-based infrastructures and application services.
• Lead projects across functional teams to develop solutions for management, monitoring, testing, backup, and disaster recovery.
• Continually research emerging technologies and services to evaluate and determine value to IMSS and the Caltech community.
• Stay informed about various service models and delivery methods to match them to specific project requirements and use cases.
• Manage operations of Redhat Linux servers, including database, web servers, and LDAP servers.
• Manage Identity Provider and authentication services, Redhat Satellite services, and configuration management services like Ansible and Salt.
• Manage Tomcat servers and Java applications.
• Plan and schedule software installations and upgrades to operating systems in accordance with established IT policies and procedures; develop and deploy new services as appropriate.
• Ensure systems achieve optimum performance levels.
• Responsible for system security and integrity by evaluating, implementing, and managing appropriate software and hardware solutions.
• Develop and promote standard operating procedures.
• Develop and document internal processes.
• Responsible for hardware and software audits of servers to ensure compliance with established policies, standards, and configuration guidelines.
• Plan and organize the installations of new applications, distribute software upgrades, monitor daily activity, enforce licensing agreements, develop storage management, and provide routine backups.
• Oversee programs in administrative languages such as Python, Perl, JavaScript, and shell scripts.
• Collaborate with team members on the design, implementation, and support of standardized automation systems.
• Lead projects with team members on design, deployment, and support of infrastructure services.
• Collaborate with team members in the development of new projects and services arising from the academic and technical needs of supported groups.
• Participate in an on-call rotation and provide after-hours support.
• Forecast infrastructure needs for long-term planning.
• Administer and manage OpenSearch or ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack, including deployment, configuration, performance tuning, and monitoring.

Requirements

• B.S. in Computer Science, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent.
• 6 years of experience with system administration.
• Five years of experience using and supporting the Linux operating system.
• Five years of hands-on experience managing and supporting AWS cloud environments, including core services such as EC2, S3, IAM, and VPC.
• Excellent customer relations, written, and oral communication skills.
• Excellent troubleshooting, debugging, and diagnostic skills.
• Solid understanding of networking concepts, including routing, subnets, DNS, and software firewall configurations.
• Familiarity with containers and API scripting.

Preferred Qualifications

• M.S. in a relevant field.
• Experience administering and supporting Shibboleth Identity Provider (IdP) and Service Provider (SP) systems, including configuration, maintenance, and integration with SAML-based authentication services.
• Demonstrated expertise in architecting AWS solutions, automating cloud infrastructure and services using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools (e.g., Terraform).

Benefits

As one of the largest employers in Pasadena, CA, Caltech is committed to providing comprehensive benefits to eligible employees and their eligible dependents. Our benefits package includes:

• Competitive compensation.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Retirement savings plans.
• Generous paid time off (vacation, holidays, sick time, parental leave, bereavement, etc.).
• Tuition reimbursement.
• Additional benefits such as onsite counseling and sick time for non-benefit eligible employees.

Pay

Hiring range: $135,100 to $155,300 per year. The salary of the finalist(s) selected for this role will be set based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to, internal equity, experience, education, specialty, and training.