Senior Systems Administrator

Company Description

Zayo provides mission-critical bandwidth to the world’s most impactful companies, fueling the innovations that are transforming our society. Zayo’s 141,000-mile network in North America and Europe includes extensive metro connectivity to thousands of buildings and data centers. Zayo’s communications infrastructure solutions include dark fiber, private data networks, wavelengths, Ethernet, and dedicated Internet access. Zayo serves wireless and wireline carriers, media, tech, content, finance, healthcare and other large enterprises.

Zayo Group is seeking an experienced and highly motivated System Administrator to join our Network Automation Software Engineering team. Our team develops and maintains the software platforms, microservices, and automation solutions that enable the provisioning, configuration, and management of Zayo's large-scale telecommunications network infrastructure.

In this role, you will be responsible for the availability, performance, reliability, security, and ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure and development platforms that support our network automation ecosystem. These systems are critical to both our software engineering workflows and the operational capabilities of Zayo's network.

You will administer and support a variety of platforms, including Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO), GitLab, Jenkins, Docker, Docker Swarm, and other supporting development, deployment, and automation technologies. Your responsibilities will include system administration, software installation and upgrades, performance tuning, troubleshooting, capacity planning, and proactive maintenance.

The ideal candidate is a highly capable Linux system administrator who enjoys solving complex infrastructure problems, takes ownership of system reliability, and is comfortable working with both traditional Linux infrastructure and modern containerized application environments.

You will work closely with software engineers and network engineering teams to ensure our platforms are stable, performant, secure, and capable of meeting evolving business and technical requirements.

Key Responsibilities

Systems Administration & Infrastructure Management

• •Install, configure, administer, and maintain Linux-based servers and application infrastructure supporting the network automation environment.
• •Manage the availability, reliability, and performance of critical platforms, including Cisco NSO, GitLab, Jenkins, Docker, and Docker Swarm.
• •Perform routine system administration tasks, including operating system maintenance, software installations, package management, configuration changes, and system health checks.
• •Plan and execute software upgrades, patches, and platform migrations while minimizing disruption to development workflows and production operations.
• •Monitor system resource utilization, including CPU, memory, disk, network, and application performance, to identify and address potential issues.
• •Perform system tuning and configuration optimization to improve performance, stability, and resource efficiency.
• •Manage system capacity and resource allocation to support application growth and evolving infrastructure requirements.
• •Maintain accurate system documentation, configuration records, operational procedures, and troubleshooting guides.

Platform Administration & Support

• •Administer and maintain Cisco NSO environments, including software upgrades, patching, configuration management, application health monitoring, and troubleshooting.
• •Support GitLab infrastructure, including repository services, CI/CD runners, application configuration, system upgrades, and performance optimization.
• •Maintain Jenkins servers, agents, plugins, integrations, and build execution environments.
• •Administer Docker hosts and Docker Swarm clusters, including cluster health, node management, service scheduling, networking, storage, and resource allocation.
• •Manage supporting developer tooling and infrastructure services as required by the engineering team.
• •Collaborate with software engineers to troubleshoot application deployments, build failures, infrastructure dependencies, and environment-related issues.
• •Maintain consistent, reliable development, testing, staging, and production environments.

Monitoring, Troubleshooting & Reliability

• •Proactively monitor infrastructure and application health to detect and address potential problems before they impact users or network operations.
• •Diagnose and resolve complex system issues involving Linux, application services, containers, networking, storage, and system dependencies.
• •Investigate service outages, performance degradation, deployment failures, and unexpected system behavior.
• •Analyze system logs, performance metrics, and diagnostic information to identify root causes and implement lasting solutions.
• •Participate in incident response, service restoration, root cause analysis, and preventative improvement efforts.
• •Develop and maintain monitoring, alerting, and health-check capabilities to improve system visibility and reduce operational risk.
• •Identify recurring issues and implement improvements that increase platform stability, recoverability, and maintainability.
• •Establish and maintain backup, recovery, and disaster recovery procedures for critical infrastructure and application platforms.

Security, Maintenance & Lifecycle Management

• •Apply application updates and security patches in accordance with established maintenance practices.
• •Maintain secure system configurations, appropriate access controls, and service account permissions.
• •Support certificate management, secrets management, and secure communication between infrastructure components.
• •Monitor platform versions, software dependencies, and vendor support lifecycles to identify necessary upgrades or replacements.
• •Evaluate the operational impact of proposed changes and coordinate maintenance activities with affected engineering and operations teams.
• •Ensure infrastructure changes are documented, tested when appropriate, and implemented with suitable rollback procedures.
• •Assist with vulnerability remediation and compliance with organizational security policies.

Automation & Continuous Improvement

• •Develop and maintain scripts and automation tools to reduce manual administration tasks and improve operational consistency.
• •Use scripting languages such as Bash and Python to automate system maintenance, monitoring, configuration, and troubleshooting activities.
• •Identify opportunities to standardize system configurations and improve infrastructure management processes.
• •Work with software engineers to improve CI/CD infrastructure, application deployment reliability, and development environment performance.
• •Evaluate and recommend improvements to existing tools, platforms, and operational practices.
• •Contribute to capacity planning, infrastructure modernization, and lifecycle management initiatives.

Collaboration & Operational Ownership

• •Work closely with software engineers, network engineers, security teams, and infrastructure stakeholders to understand system requirements and operational priorities.
• •Serve as a primary technical resource for infrastructure and platform administration within the Network Automation team.
• •Take ownership of infrastructure issues from initial investigation through resolution and follow-up.
• •Participate in team planning, technical discussions, and Agile development activities as appropriate.
• •Communicate maintenance activities, outages, risks, and technical issues clearly to affected stakeholders.
• •Coordinate changes to critical systems to minimize operational disruption.
• •Support production incident response and scheduled maintenance activities, including occasional after-hours work when required.

Required Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Systems Administration, or a related field, or equivalent practical e