Infrastructure Lead, Information and Communications Technology

**Infrastructure Lead, Information and Communications Technology**:
**Description**:
The University of Saskatchewan is a world leader in water and food security, vaccine development and infectious diseases, and human, animal, and environmental health. The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) division provides innovative and disciplined support and expertise as an integral part of ensuring USask becomes the university the world needs. The division is also committed to fostering a workplace culture that promotes diversity, collaboration, and professional growth.

USask provides employees with many benefits such as flexible work arrangements; access to the university’s recreation services; ongoing professional development and mentorship and a comprehensive benefits and pension program.

**Primary Purpose**:
The Infrastructure Lead coordinates the deployment, ongoing support and administration of Systems and ARC infrastructure, including server virtualization, large storage systems, compute farms, backup servers, and tape libraries, which underpin the teaching, learning, research and administrative goals of the university. The Infrastructure Lead ensures that the compute, storage and backup resources are highly available, effectively administered, patched, secured, repaired and maintained. In consultation with other ICT teams, the Infrastructure Lead guides the implementation of technical solutions to provide stable IT infrastructure services to the University.

**Nature of Work**:
This position is involved in the coordination of effective design, operation and enhancement of the institutional virtual infrastructure, advanced research computing infrastructure, storage and backup infrastructure, including urgent maintenance, implementation of highly available and redundant designs for storage and compute services, as well as the long-term analysis of future directions for virtual and physical infrastructure

The role will include leading a team of Infrastructure and Systems Administrators responsible for hardware installation and maintenance and software installation and configuration. It requires keen attention to detail and careful, measured actions that minimize risks associated with errors that compromise data. The position requires the ability to work effectively both independently and as a collaborative team member, and to appropriately prioritize response to a wide variety of time-sensitive tasks. Periodic evening or weekend work is involved, which will be balanced with flex time considerations.

**Typical Duties/Accountabilities**:

- Ensure the architecture of the institution’s virtualization, advanced research computing, storage, and backup systems provide a high level of reliability, performance, integrity, and security;
- Lead a team of colleagues that work collaboratively with to provide:

- Communicate progress and issues regularly with colleagues, stakeholders, clients and the ICT leadership team;
- Coordinate Infrastructure security and disaster preparedness with ICT Security as well as participate in agency audits.
- Provide effective change management practices to optimize the benefits and minimize disruption to the Universities teaching, research and administration systems;
- Ensure the team performs at a high level by effectively communicating expectations, providing feedback, and participating in coaching and mentorship;
- Lead the proposal, discussion and execution of services;
- Ensure liability and risk are responsibly mitigated by remaining current with best practices, current auditing practices, and managing contract and licensing relationships.

**Qualifications**:
**Education**:
A University degree in Computer Science. A graduate-level degree would be consider an asset. An equivalent combination of education and experience will be considered.

**Experience**:

- Seven years’ experience leading a team managing ICT infrastructure.
- Large-scale SAN storage architecture, preferably at the Petabyte-scale;
- Enterprise Backup architecture, preferably at the Petabyte-scale;
- Demonstrated ability to contribute to the design and implementation of new virtualization, storage and backup systems;
- Scripting to automate routine tasks preferably using Python and/or Powershell.

**Familiarity with**:

- Management of Enterprise solutions including VMware vCenter, Bright cluster manager, Veeam, Pure1, IBM Storage Protect or similar solutions;
- Datacenter networking, firewalling and physical connectivity;
- Knowledge of Dell and Lenovo Servers, including their central management solutions;
- Experience with iSCSI storage networks design and its effective usage;
- Recent work experience at a senior level in system administration at a post-secondary institution and supporting a large (10,000 or more) user population;
- Experience with bright cluster manager in large clusters with multiple hardware type as well as multiple stakeholders would be an asset.
- Experience in Vmware administrati