Senior System Admin

Nearfield Instruments; Rotterdam; On-site; EUR 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

30 holidays per calendar year

8% holiday allowance

Commuting allowance

Discount on health insurance

Team-driven culture

Job summary

Nearfield Instruments is seeking an IT Operations Engineer to run and continuously improve our internal IT operations focusing on Microsoft 365, Active Directory, Windows Server, and security operations. You will partner with engineering and business teams to keep systems stable, secure, and compliant, building playbooks, improving observability, and guiding incident response.

This is a hands-on role at a fast-growing scale-up that values practical solutions, risk-based security, and clear

Qualifications

• ~5 years in IT operations / systems administration roles.
• Strong hands-on Microsoft 365 administration (core services + identity).
• Strong Active Directory + Group Policy administration experience.
• Solid Windows Server experience (patching, roles/features, troubleshooting, hardening).
• Experience with monitoring tools (infrastructure/app/service monitoring, alert tuning, dashboards).
• Experience creating and maintaining security playbooks/runbooks (incident handling).
• Demonstrable ISO/IEC 27001 experience (controls, evidence, audits).

Responsibilities

• Own day-to-day IT operations across Microsoft 365 services.
• Administer and harden Active Directory and Windows Server.
• Manage endpoints and policies (Intune, device compliance, conditional access).
• Improve operational visibility with monitoring/alerting for core services.
• Build and maintain security playbooks and incident runbooks.
• Support vulnerability and patch management and evidence capture.
• Own operational hygiene: docs, runbooks, change control, processes.
• Handle escalations on authentication, access, policies, endpoints, services.

Skills

IT operations

Microsoft 365 administration

Active Directory

Windows Server hardening

Monitoring & observability

Security incident response

ISO 27001 familiarity

Tools

Palo Alto (Prisma/Cortex)

Zabbix

Job description

We’re hiring an IT Operations Engineer to run and continuously improve our internal IT operations with a strong focus on Microsoft 365, Active Directory, Windows Server, and security operations. This role sits at the intersection of reliability and security: you’ll standardize how we operate, improve observability through monitoring tooling, and build pragmatic security playbooks that make incident handling faster and more consistent.

You’ll work closely with engineering and business stakeholders to keep systems stable, secure, and compliant.

About Nearfield Instruments

Nearfield Instruments (NFI) is a fast-growing scale-up high-tech company. We design, develop, integrate, market and service advanced metrology machines. Our machines enables our customers - the world’s leading chipmakers – to increase the production yields, and thus, functionality of their microchips, which in turn leads to smaller, more powerful consumer electronics.

Founded in 2016, we bring together the most creative minds (approx. 380 employees) in science and technology and develop a one-of-a-kind, revolutionary high throughput Scanning Probe Microscopy system.

What you’ll do:

• Own day-to-day IT operations across Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint/OneDrive, Entra ID/Azure AD).

• Administer and harden Active Directory and Windows Server (GPO, patching, RBAC/permissions, baseline configs).

• Manage endpoints and policies (e.g., Intune, device compliance, conditional access, Windows update rings) where applicable.

• Improve operational visibility: implement and tune monitoring/alerting for core services (identity, endpoints, servers, key business systems).

• Build and maintain security playbooks (incident response runbooks, triage steps, containment actions, escalation paths).

• Support vulnerability and patch management: tracking, remediation coordination, and evidence capture.

• Own operational hygiene: documentation, runbooks, change control, and repeatable processes.

• Handle escalations: troubleshoot authentication, access, policy, endpoint, and service issues end-to-end.

• Contribute to ISO 27001 practices: controls implementation support, evidence gathering, audits, and continuous improvement.

What we’re looking for:

Must-have

• ~5 years in IT operations / systems administration roles.

• Strong hands‑on experience with Microsoft 365 administration (core services + identity).

• Strong Active Directory + Group Policy administration experience (permissions, OU design, policy hygiene).

• Solid Windows Server experience (patching, roles/features, troubleshooting, hardening).

• Experience with monitoring tools (infrastructure/app/service monitoring, alert tuning, dashboards, on‑call hygiene).

• Experience creating and maintaining security playbooks/runbooks (structured incident handling, triage-to-resolution workflows).

• Demonstrable experience working in an environment with ISO/IEC 27001 (controls, evidence, audits, risk treatment, policies).

Nice-to-have

• Entra ID security features: Conditional Access, PIM, identity protection, MFA strategy.

• Familiarity with Microsoft security tooling.

• Automation skills.

• Experience with ticketing/ITSM practices (incident/problem/change management).

• Backup/DR exposure and periodic restore testing.

• Basic networking knowledge (DNS, routing concepts) for troubleshooting identity/service issues.

• Experience with Palo Alto products (Prisma / Cortex / Strata).

• Experience with Zabbix.

What success looks like

• Stable, predictable IT operations with fewer recurring issues and clearer ownership.

• Improved security posture through enforceable baselines, least privilege, and high patch compliance.

• Monitoring that’s actionable (less noise, faster detection, better dashboards).

• Security playbooks that reduce incident time‑to‑contain and create consistent outcomes.

• ISO 27001 readiness: clean evidence trails, clear controls ownership, and continuous improvement.

What can you expect from us?

Getting on board now is a great opportunity to grow with the company from a technical, personal, and financial perspective. Nearfield's momentum is energetic and promising!

Our starting point is of course to pay someone a fair and competitive salary and besides this we offer you:

• Valuation of your work‑life balance;

• Time for some relaxation: 30 holidays per calendar year (based on 40 hours);

• 8% holiday allowance;

• Commuting allowance;

• Discount on your health insurance;

• We are here to support one another, and colleagues are there to help you. TEAM is very important, Together Everyone Achieves More!

• Besides a challenging role where you can utilize the full extent of your professional knowledge.

Recruitment, consultancy and/or other agency?

We appreciate the interest, but we source all our candidates directly. We understand that you as an intermediary want to present candidates to our interesting positions. This is not how we have structured our recruitment.

This means that all profiles offered to Nearfield Instruments will be treated as direct applications. Unless we have explicitly agreed otherwise.