Senior Systems Administrator

Founded in 2000, Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation Limited (QCIF) is a not-for-profit company whose mission is to accelerate research and innovation by provisioning cutting-edge data and digital capabilities, upskilling current and future researchers and innovators, and catalysing collaboration across Australia.

The Data and Software Solutions delivers on-demand software development capabilities while also facilitating the provision of managed services, such as platforms for sensitive data, and the development of dashboards and specialised research data portals.

Details about QCIF may be accessed on the QCIF website at http://qcif.edu.au.

About the position

To contribute to the ongoing administration, support, operations, engineering, innovation, and development of solutions and research enabling technologies to facilitate QCIF’s mission to support its customers in the use of research computing infrastructure and services. To provide high level advisory and summary data to aid in the decision-making processes for strategy, infrastructure, solutions, and investment.

Duties

1. Show innovation and technical leadership in all aspects of systems planning, architecture, deployment, development, support, performance engineering, and administration.
2. Provide high level guidance, architectural review, knowledge and engineering experience, encouraging, leading and facilitating architectural robustness, dialogue, and design.
3. Identify, recommend, and implement opportunities to improve systems or processes, develop new services or facilities to improve research outcomes for customers and the overall strategic mission of QCIF.
4. Advanced project management functions for large deployments, capital works, infrastructure upgrades and migrations, where required.
5. Seek out, research and implement sector leading approaches to problems, providing leadership approaches to systems design and new initiatives.
6. Act as a subject matter expert on medium to high level committees for implementation, procurement, and strategic initiatives.
7. Demonstrate advanced judgement and systems-thinking approaches, lateral thinking, and sector leading problem-solving abilities in all aspects of the role.
8. Be available during critical incidents or other emergencies to assist with resolution and act as a point of communication and liaison to keep stakeholders aware of progress during incidents.
9. Participate in, manage and assess in the resolution of technical problems reported by clients and team members via the service desk or other escalation paths.
10. Undertake other work as directed by QCIF, consistent with the skills and knowledge required of the position.
11. Plan, deploy, implement and continually review security posture, capability and implementation to ensure applications and platforms adhere to best practice and are in line with Information Security Policy and Guidelines.
12. Deployment, configuration, maintenance, and administration of several Windows environments (e.g. Microsoft Windows Server, Active Directory, SQL Server, VPN, remote desktop and application software).
13. Deployment, configuration, maintenance, and administration of Linux environments.
14. Documentation of procedures, process, systems, platforms in consolidated and unified platforms for organisational knowledge repositories.
15. High level reporting, implementation and recommendation of capacity and resource management approaches in compute and storage domains.
16. Oversight and guidance of deployment, patching, monitoring and platform security via frameworks such as Puppet, Ansible, and others.
17. Contribute to the development and delivery of training programs.
18. Where appropriate, supervision or shared supervision of other staff, interns and/or students in relevant projects.

About you

1. An Honours or Masters degree in Computer Science or Information Technology or a related discipline with at least 7 years of experience, a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Information Technology or a related discipline with at least 10 years of subsequent relevant work experience, or an equivalent combination of relevant experience and/or education/training.
2. An expert level practical and functional understanding of systems administration principles ranging from advanced Windows and Linux administration through to more advanced topics such as security hardening and optimisation of the operating system environmental variables.
3. An advanced understanding of networking technologies and protocols (ethernet, TCP stack, firewall).
4. Experience working with Agile project management methods.
5. Practical skills in scripting languages (e.g. Python, Perl, shell, PowerShell, etc.).
6. High level of creative thinking capability and excellent interpersonal skills including the ability to communicate effectively with clients by telephone, email and in person.
7. Ability to prioritise own workload, work independently and meet deadlines.
8. Commitment to upholding the QCIF’s values, and with the outstanding personal qualities of openness, respectfulness and integrity.
9. Practitioner and expert level skills in cloud platforms (e.g. OpenStack, Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform).
10. Knowledge/experience with virtualisation frameworks (e.g. KVM, Proxmox, etc.).
11. Knowledge/experience with Kubernetes/Containerisation.
12. Knowledge/experience with DevOps / DevSecOps.
13. Knowledge/experience of deployment of relational/NoSQL databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server, MongoDB).
14. Knowledge of programming languages (e.g. Dart, Java, C++, etc).
15. Skills and experience in cybersecurity and information security management (e.g. ISO/IEC 27001, NIST Cybersecurity Framework, Australian Information Security Manual).
16. Knowledge and experience in project management.

QCIF values diversity and inclusion and actively encourages applications from those who bring diversity to QCIF.

Flexible working arrangements may be negotiated.