IT Systems Administrator Team Leader

The Opportunity:

We are looking for an enthusiastic individual to join the core infrastructure team of one of the world’s leading research universities as a Systems Administrator.  

Within this role you will use enterprise technologies in a challenging and changing technical environment, and leading a team responsible for the provision of mission critical IT platforms on which most core University services rely. 

This is an open-ended position and we would ideally like someone to work 35hrs per week (Monday-Friday), with occasional out of hours work. However, we are committed to offering flexibility where possible and are happy to consider working patterns such as compressed hours or staggered start/finish times. You will be able to work flexibly between home, our data centres and from our office with views of Edinburgh Castle

What we can offer you:

• A competitive salary of between £49,250 to £60,321. Given the seniority of the role, we would expect to appoint towards the higher end of the scale depending on the experience of the candidate.
• An interesting and varied portfolio of services and IT infrastructures to work on, develop and support, including working in modern datacentres.
• Comprehensive Staff Benefits, such as a generous holiday entitlement, a defined benefits pension scheme, staff discounts, family-friendly initiatives, and flexible work options. Check out the full list on our staff benefits page(opens in a new tab) and use our reward calculator to discover the total value of your pay and benefits

What the job involves:

• Leading one of two teams in the Enterprise Services section comprising 7 IT infrastructure engineers who are running and managing services on both Windows and Linux infrastructure.  These services are delivered from on premise infrastructure and in future from hybrid multi-cloud hosted platforms. This is a new team, bringing together Windows and Linux engineers under common line management and as their team leader one of your first tasks will be to shape this new team and build on the strengths of each individual team member.
• Key to the role is ensuring that we maintain legacy applications whilst transforming our services so that they can be modernised. Our services are increasingly delivered in partnership with cloud providers and Software as a Service and key to the role is the integration of services such as Active Directory with EntraID and Azure.
• The maintenance and security of all IT services that lie within the team and the wider section’s technical service portfolio.
• Collaborating with other team members on maintaining services such as email infrastructure, directory services, data backups and authentication services.
• Ensuring that day to day triaging and resolution of support calls and service requests meet agreed service levels as part of a wider third-line support team.
• Working in close partnership with the Section Manager to ensure the University’s IT services are delivered with a high level of service availability.
• Contributing to projects that will develop and improve the IT services of the University.

View the full job description and snapshot of a typical day.

A bit about you:

Essential:

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Excellent staff management skills and experience of managing IT technical teams including being a good listener and mentor, and willingness to help both team members and people from other areas of the University;
• An awareness and commitment to security issues;
• An ability to keep up to date with the latest hardware and operating system releases and emerging technologies in order to inform decisions on how best to exploit these innovations;
• A commitment to maintain a thorough knowledge of University IT policy, facilities and services and a very sound understanding of all of the technologies underlying their specific IT environment;
• Demonstrable experience or knowledge of system administration of networked Windows/Unix/Linux servers including experience with some of the following: storage management products, web servers, virtualisation, authentication and authorisation technologies, email, DNS, network technologies such as application switching, directory services, package configuration management and the ability to program and script in more than one common language e.g. PowerShell, bash, perl, python, C, Java;
• Well-developed analytical and problem solving skills with the ability to think creatively about solutions;
• Ability to communicate effectively verbally and in writing to both technical and non-technical people;
• Ability to react quickly to changing demands and to handle different high priority tasks concurrently;
• Ability to work with minimum supervision accurately and consistently, and to maintain high standards when working under pressure, to ensure robust solutions are delivered in the correct timeframe;
• Ability to work effectively in a team and in partnerships with stakeholders.

Desirable:

• Previous experience of working with large scale physical and virtualised infrastructure and application networking technologies like firewalls and load balancers.
• Previous experience of managing Azure hosted services and EntraID.
• Knowledge of shell scripting: bash or PowerShell, Python and Puppet DSL.

Application procedure:

We welcome informal enquiries about the role – to find out more, please email Graeme Wood (Head of Enterprise Services) at Graeme.Wood@ed.ac.uk

We do not require support from recruitment agencies for this position.

The University is committed to equality, diversity and inclusion. If you have the right skills for the job, we want to hear from you. We encourage applications from the right candidates regardless of age, gender identity, disability, sexual orientation, religion, belief or race. 

Prior to any employment commencing candidates will be required to evidence Right to Work in the UK. 

On this occasion the University will not consider applicants requiring sponsorship for this role. International workers will therefore only be able to take up this role if they can demonstrate an alternative right to work in the UK.

To apply, upload a CV and cover letter before 30 October 2024.

Interviews will be held during week commencing 18 November 2024, preferably in person but can be online.

About Us

As a world-leading research-intensive University, we are here to address tomorrow’s greatest challenges. Between now and 2030 we will do that with a values-led approach to teaching, research and innovation, and through the strength of our relationships, both locally and globally.

About the Team

The Infrastructure Division provides the core platforms and technologies on which the University's research, learning, teaching and digital administration depend. This includes management of the University's data and telephone networks and support of managed desktop computing and open-access computer suites. Two resilient datacentres host large-scale compute and data services for research, and server and storage infrastructure for providing enterprise services. The division also provides infrastructure technologies such as authentication and authorisation used by University I.T. services.

Please see http://tinyurl.com.cwhwysv for further information on the IT Infrastructure Division.