System Administrator

HEAnet is Ireland’s National Research and Education Network, providing internet connectivity and ICT shared services across all levels of the Irish education system, reaching 1,000,000 end users. We connect learners and researchers across all of Ireland to education resources and to fellow national educational and research networks in Europe, and the rest of the world. We are looking for Linux System Administrators to join our Systems team.What the Systems Team does:The Systems Team drives the deployment and maintenance of HEAnet’s systems and services.The Teams responsibilities fall into 3 streams.Core infrastructure: This is a combination of virtual infrastructure, physical servers, and appliances, spread across our datacentres, and now an increasing foothold in containerisation and the Cloud. Essential for smooth operation is the automation and management of these resources.Internal Services: All the pieces that go on behind the scenes to be able to deliver services, such as NTP, monitoring, logging, load balancers, database clusters, storage, authentication, as well as providing tools and services to other internal technical teams.External Services: All the above help us to provide a diverse range of shared services to IT departments, educators, learners and researchers. Some of our more widely used services include, Identity and Access Management (Edugate), wifi roaming (eduroam), large file transfers, and video related services including video conferencing and, live & on-demand streaming.What you get from us:From the team We value knowledge sharing and communication. We start each week with a team meeting to cover outstanding issues and planned work for the week, combined with team stand-ups each morning to make sure no one is hitting any roadblocks. You will also have a 1:1 meeting every two weeks with your manager. Every Friday we have presentations from anyone in the company on a wide range of topics from technical demos to project management to mental health. On different days of the week any team member may be working from home, so we keep in touch using instant messaging, video conferencing and other communication tools.We encourage critical thinking and the exploration of new ideas. We have often form cross-team special interest groups for specific topic discussions, both ongoing and for fixed projects. By design we encourage that the engineering standards that we set are influenced from the ground up, as the people working within the standards are the ones most informed.We provide a diverse workload. Everyone on the team has a core responsibility to a service or piece of infrastructure, but we limit single performance objectives to a max of 30%, so you will get to work in multiple areas with different team members.We promote a healthy work/life balance. Work outside of standard hours is rare and agreed in advance. We take the care of our team members mental health seriously.Company Benefits Annual performance management systemProfessional education supportComprehensive group and individual training & development initiativesOn-going well-being initiativesHealth insurance for employeesDefined contribution pension schemeFlexible start/finish timesWorking from homeEmployee Assistance Programme (EAP)Taxsaver Ticket schemeCycle to Work schemeWhat we need from you:Significant Linux system administration experience. Covering areas such as high availability, LAMP stacks, application support and scripting.Understanding of Internet protocols and infrastructure.Familiarity with automation and configuration management.Participation in the On-Call Rota, with additional compensation (avg. 1 week every 2 months)Ability to work in a team, with a friendly and collaborative approach.Desire to increase and share knowledgeBonus points:The above skills cover the core of many System Administrators, but some of our services touch on technologies that are more specialised, or required greater experience. We don’t need you to have experience in the following areas, but if you did it could be beneficial.SAML (or other similar authentication standards)VMWare administrator/managementStandards based video conferencing (H.323)Database administrationCloud deployment and administrationContainerisation