System Administrator III

About the role

The System Administrator III provides advanced enterprise systems administration and operational support for STA’s mission-critical infrastructure environment. This role serves as a senior technical resource responsible for Windows and Linux server administration, Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization, high availability, cloud and hybrid operations, monitoring, backup and recovery, patch management, and service continuity across on-premises and cloud environments.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with Security, Network Engineering, Service Desk, IT leadership, and operational teams to support infrastructure initiatives, datacenter operations, hybrid cloud services, and service continuity.
• Provide clear technical communication during incidents, outages, maintenance windows, recovery activities, vulnerability remediation efforts, and post-incident reviews.
• Maintain and publish detailed technical documentation, standard server builds, runbooks, recovery procedures, and operational handoffs.
• Translate complex technical issues involving compute, virtualization, identity dependencies, backup, cloud platforms, and platform services into practical operational communication for non-technical stakeholders.
• Manage enterprise patching schedules, maintenance windows, operational deadlines, system lifecycle activities, host updates, certificate renewals, backup upgrades, and platform changes with minimal disruption to operations.
• Support rotating on-call responsibilities and respond promptly to after-hours incidents, service interruptions, backup failures, monitoring alerts, and infrastructure restoration needs.
• Prioritize infrastructure incidents, operational requests, restore activities, queue work, and project deliverables based on operational risk, service impact, and business urgency.
• Administer Windows and Linux server environments supporting mission-critical clinical, donor, and business workloads, including OS upgrades, role and feature management, certificate maintenance, service account coordination, and system hardening aligned to STA standards.
• Administer Microsoft Hyper-V platforms, including host lifecycle, cluster health, failover behavior, live migration, storage and networking dependencies, VM provisioning standards, high availability settings, resiliency configuration, and capacity management.
• Maintain accurate monitoring alignment, alert tuning, dashboard effectiveness, capacity forecasting, vulnerability remediation tracking, patch verification, and operational exception documentation.
• Evaluate system requirements and translate business and operational needs into secure, supportable technical specifications with defined validation, monitoring, and recovery requirements.
• Automate repetitive operational tasks using PowerShell, scripting, systems management tools, and repeatable procedures to improve consistency, reduce manual intervention, and prevent configuration drift.
• Provide technical mentorship and knowledge transfer to Service Desk and junior IT staff through published runbooks and operational handoffs.
• Lead infrastructure recovery efforts during high-impact incidents and outages, including file-level recovery, system-level recovery, VM recovery, Hyper-V host recovery, and coordination of restoration activities.
• Evaluate system requirements and translate business and operational needs into secure, supportable technical specifications with defined validation, monitoring, and recovery requirements.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Management Information Systems, or related field required.
• Minimum of five (5) years of progressive systems administration experience required in an enterprise environment, including datacenter operations, Windows Server administration, virtualization, backup and restore, incident restoration, monitoring, and operational documentation.
• Minimum of three (3) years of hands-on experience administering and operating Microsoft Hyper-V in a production environment required, including clustering, high availability, live migration, host lifecycle, resiliency validation, and capacity management.
• Experience supporting enterprise backup and recovery operations, cloud infrastructure, and hybrid systems environments required.
• Strong Windows Server administration experience required, including build standards, troubleshooting, upgrades, certificates, core services, Active Directory, DNS dependencies, and Group Policy impacts.
• Strong monitoring tool usage required for trend analysis, early-warning detection, operational dashboards, alert tuning, and incident response improvement.
• Strong PowerShell scripting skills and automation mindset preferred to reduce manual work, improve consistency, and prevent configuration drift.
• Microsoft Certified: Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate (AZ-800 and AZ-801) preferred or equivalent enterprise administration experience.
• Current Driver’s License is required and maintained with an acceptable driving record as defined by STA policy.