Senior System Engineer (Azure Cloud)

An industry leading Software as a Service (SaaS) company is seeking a Senior Systems Engineer to support their migration to Azure. In this role you will understand all aspects of Azure Cloud and also have experience with AWS. You will plan and coordinate the design, installation, administration, and usage of Cloud or on-prem server, storage, virtualization, and other distributed technologies. You will conduct system analysis and development to keep systems current with changing technologies. Additionally, you will coordinate communication and support between user-community and the technical/operations functions of IT in relationship with all Windows/Linux functions. As a Senior Engineer, you will provide recommendations and technology roadmaps to management in the research, design, and development of effective operating programs, systems, procedures, and practices.

Job Duties:

• Interfaces with Technology Teams to support ongoing efforts, and works with external resources and vendors, giving and receiving information.
• Identifies and addresses potential areas where existing policies and procedures require change, or where new ones need to be developed to guide and support future business lines and expansion.
• Guarantees the use of performance data and historical metrics to plan effectively for growth needs, including plan upgrades and optimizations, migrations, and new implementations.
• Provides and maintains documentation of systems architecture, troubleshooting and support guidelines, system metrics, project information and plans, and training information.
• Oversees applications running and identifies and resolves problems; continues performance enhancements with measurable benchmarks.
• Identifies and resolves efficiency issues and improves functionality.
• Provides technology stewardship for distributed technologies such as DNS, SMTP, DHCP domain controllers, active directory applications, mail, web servers and Cloud native services.
• Supports production environment, executes day-to-day maintenance tasks including problem determination and resolution and root-cause analysis. Responds to live site issues, and executes software, platform, and configuration changes.
• Defines and implement Azure Cloud-based solution architectures.
• Assists software engineers with complex or more difficult technical support inquiries related to hardware maintenance and/or repairs, as necessary.
• Researches software updates and patches to supported applications and various operating systems; assists system engineers with installation and testing, as necessary.
• Contributes to the development of best practice standards including capacity planning, monitoring, configuration, security, historical metrics, recovery strategies, and migration strategies. Validates and adheres to these defined best-practice standards.
• Upgrades, installs, and configures monitoring solutions for Azure IaaS, Windows, Linux servers and PaaS services like Azure SQL.

Necessary Experience & Skills:

• Must also be able to demonstrate the following skills and abilities:
• Experience with infrastructure automation - Infrastructure as Code.
• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to establish collaborative working relationships across global teams.
• Thorough knowledge of Private and Public Clouds, Azure services, Azure networking, Windows, Linux, VMware, Microsoft Active Directory; Azure AD, TCP/IP / DHCP / WINS / DNS and virtualization/container technologies such as Docker.
• Broad technical capabilities to distinguish between hardware/software-related problems, in the Cloud or in the hybrid on-prem systems.
• At least 6 years of experience in troubleshooting Cloud hosted systems, plus 3 or more years of systems engineering experience designing and implementing VMWare and Microsoft server/workstation technologies, and a proven track record of executing day-to-day maintenance tasks including problem determination/ resolution, and root-cause analysis.
• An undergraduate degree from an accredited college or university with a focus in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline. Or in the absence of a degree, related job experience will be considered.
• Ability to apply principles of analytical thinking to define problems, identify gaps, collect data, establish facts, track, trend and analyze data, and develop recommendations to guide decision making.

Highly Desirable:

• Change Management experience
• SQL and MySQL experience

*** This position requires you be available for 24-hour ‘on-call’ service to respond to system emergencies, about once a month for a week at a time.