Job Description Summary:    

George Washington (GW) Information Technology (it.gwu.edu) is the chief provider of technology infrastructure, services and applications at GW. GW IT partners with stakeholders across GW to equip students, staff and faculty with the technology know-how and tools necessary to achieve academic excellence. Reporting to the Assistant Director, Systems Engineering Services, the Senior Systems Administrator works within the Division’s Systems Engineering Services department within the GW IT.

This senior position is responsible for installing, configuring, and administering a large number of high-impact operating systems and servers, on premise or in the cloud. This role is the highest level of system administration in the organization supporting enterprise-wide business operations. The core responsibilities of this role are to provide provisioning, installation/configuration, operation, and maintenance of systems hardware, software and infrastructure. The position will mentor peers, manage technical project, lead project teams, maintain vendor relationships, gather user requirements, troubleshoot errors, develop standard operating procedures, provide training and documentation, collaborate other GW information technology resource partners, and predict future needs.

Performs other related duties as assigned. The omission of specific duties does not preclude the supervisor from assigning duties that are logically related to the position.

Department Specific Duties:

• Deploy and maintain Linux and Windows machines on-premise and in the cloud
• Design, implement and enhance DevOps automation capabilities (Continuous Integration, Configuration Management, and Deployment Automation) in order to increase resiliency and security of our deployed systems in VMWare, AWS and Azure.
• Create and maintain scripts to automate cloud operations and cost optimization.
• Leverage, maintain, and enhance our engineering tools, including Puppet, Jenkins, and Git.

The position is based at GW’s Virginia Science & Technology campus in Ashburn, VA but may require travel to the Foggy Bottom campus located in Washington, DC.

Minimum Qualifications:    

Qualified candidates will hold a Bachelor’s degree in an appropriate area of specialization plus 5 years of relevant professional experience, or, a Master’s degree or higher in a relevant area of study plus 3 years of relevant professional experience. Degree must be conferred by the start date of the position. Degree requirements may be substituted with an equivalent combination of education, training and experience.

Preferred Qualifications:    

• Working competency in designing and deploying Enterprise Systems Solutions.
• Working competency in designing, deploying, and administering Linux (or Windows) servers.
• Working competency in AWS services, including use of EC2, RDS, ELB, S3, CloudFormation, Lambda, VPC.
• Working competency in basic scripting – e.g. Bourne, Korn, Powershell, Perl or similar languages.
• Working competency in automation using advanced scripting – e.g. Ruby, Python, Node.js, or similar languages.
• Working competency in using automation tools with tools like Puppet (ideal), Ansible or Chef.
• Working competency in performance analysis & capacity planning.
• Working competency in deploying, configuring and maintaining system monitoring, configuration management, and security tools.
• Experience in Microsoft Active Directory.
• Experience in engineering fault tolerant and highly available services.
• Experience in testing methodologies and version control.
• Experience in virtualization and managing virtual environments.
• Experience in transitioning to “IT as a Service” based methodology.
• Experience in other cloud services – e.g. Azure, GCP
• Experience in database management – e.g. RDS, MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, MS SQL Server.
• Knowledge in assisting and leading in the development of a Systems Administration team through mentoring team members.
• Knowledge in managing technical projects and project teams.
• Strong communications and customer service skills.

Typical Hiring Range    

$71202 - $113774 How is pay for new employees determined at GW?