Some information on our client:

This is a well-established Canadian company that has a worldwide enterprise with more than 3,500 employees and more than 25 manufacturing plants in Canada, the United States, England, Belgium, Holland, France and Slovakia.

Job Description

The Senior Global Systems Administrator is responsible for providing technical and operational leadership within the Global Core Infrastructure team, responsible for global Data Centre and remote site data rooms, cloud solutions, servers, storage and backup operations, disaster recovery and supplier management.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Technical Leadership

• Provides technical leadership to the globally distributed team of level 2/3 system administrators through training, coaching and continual engagement.
• Creation and maintenance of published documentation for technical procedures, policies, and standard processes related to core infrastructure. Ensures adherence by system administrators.
• Manage, optimize and plan capacity for the entire core infrastructure including storage and compute environments.
• Research new technologies to stay informed on core infrastructure industry standards and best practices. Makes recommendations to Manager, Global Core Infrastructure with detailed product evaluation for inclusion in technology roadmap
• Key technical contributor for the design and implementation of global Data Centre strategy, including cloud, on-premise and co-location options.

Operational Leadership

• Ensures access and permissions are appropriately defined, provided and maintained for all system administrators
• Closely adheres to defined Global IT Service Management processes (when published) – change management, incident management, problem management, service level management, knowledge management and request fulfillment processes
• Provide level 2 or 3 support, and above, for any global core infrastructure issue in line with defined SLA’s and OLA’s. Hands over unresolved critical/high priority incidents to other global team members with detailed supporting documentation at the end of normal working hours or under coordination of Manager if for an off-hours incident.

• Takes leadership responsibility to lead the organization in the resumption of services in the event of serious disruption of technology services

• Maintains team on-call rotation and, for the period scheduled, is expected to respond (within SLA) and troubleshoot incidents for any global location outside of business-hours. For example, during the night and at weekends.
• Key leader in defining Disaster Recovery planning and process. Leads testing and subsequent optimization of plan.

Project Delivery

• Serves as the primary Core Infrastructure contact for large projects when more than one System Administrator is engaged. Ensures alignment of activities and technical approach.
• Collaborates with project team members, providing technical leadership, assist in creation of detailed task plans and executes activities, communicating status accordingly
• Effectively communicates with variety of stakeholders across the business and other IT teams to ascertain their needs.
• Help ensure relevant milestones and task plans for core infrastructure are reached to ensure successful delivery of projects.

Vendor Management

• Serves as primary liaison with core infrastructure system vendors for maintenance and updates.
• Responsible for key vendor operational relationships - proactive performance management and SLA’s, incident handling and issue/problem resolution and escalation.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering or related field.
• 10 – 15 years related experience.
• Multiple years of Data Centre experience including cloud, on-premise and co-location options
• Experience operating in a 24 x 7 global operations and support environment
• Able to travel frequently to supported site locations (25%)

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Multiple years of leadership experience in global teams
• Ability to coordinate and lead complex cross-functional projects given multiple competing priorities or perspectives
• Strong “service provider” and “business partner” orientation. A visible, collaborative and accessible leader to both the IT organization and the rest of the business.
• Ability to manage ambiguity, risk, and changing direction of projects and strategies
• Ability to work effectively in high-pressure situations that require sound decision making and may involve confidential or sensitive matters
• Excellent interpersonal, leadership, and management skills and high professional standards for work quality
• Excellent problem-solving and critical thinking skills
• Exceptional written and oral communication skills, including the ability to communicate technical or financial information to a non-technical audience
• ITIL and Project Management certification
• Significant business and financial acumen