Junior Systems Engineer

Location: DMGT – 51 Astor Place New York, NY 10003
Position: Permanent

Job Introduction

DMG Media Technology is the IT Service provider for many well-known, prestigious and successful brands including the Daily Mail, Mail Online, The Mail on Sunday, Metro, iNews and NewScientist. We are seeking a suitable candidate to join our IT team based out of our New York office as an extension of our global infrastructure and networking teams.

The successful candidate will join an immediate team of five, sharing responsibilities for supporting the virtual and physical infrastructure in our New York and Los Angeles offices and New Jersey data centre. This specific role will focus heavily on collaborations with both the networking and infrastructure teams while picking up tasks & projects outside of London's normal business hours.

It's paramount the right candidate poses a predominant skill set in networking, VMware, Microsoft, and Unix administration while at the same time can demonstrate a proven track record in desktop services and end user support. This candidate should excel when it comes to planning, tracking, and managing incidents, requests, problems and service improvements/projects.

For the right candidate, this is a fantastic opportunity to join a fast-paced media company and advanced technology department. The right candidate will experience a rewarding role that blends a mixture of hands-on technology support and end user satisfaction whilst keeping up to speed often being at the forefront of new technologies.

Main Responsibilities

• Provide technology insight and support to key management staff and peers.
• Manage tasks to tight deadlines, provide regular updates and manage expectations accordingly.
• Act as a technical escalation point for the applications owners to resolve issues swiftly, identify find root causes and mitigate symptoms while continually improving service(s) we deliver.
• Understand and work towards a strategy set out by senior management ensuring we adhere to direction and execute tasks based on priority to meet strategy deadlines.
• Constantly improve functional monitoring and non-functional monitoring of the infrastructure, to head off any issue that might occur.
• Be responsible for patching the infrastructure in accordance with the security policy.
• Investigating and resolving incidents assigned to the infrastructure services and networking teams and ensuring incidents are closed in a timely fashion to meet defined IT Services Levels.
• Ensuring in house knowledge documentation used by Infrastructure teams is up to date within ServiceNow.
• Providing clear, accurate and timely updates to the customer with the progress of any incident resolution.
• Providing the Service Desk with information about incidents and problems to assist with the identification and tracking of common and re-occurring issues.
• The planning and delivery of all patches, maintenance releases and all major product enhancement releases to infrastructure components, ensuring changes to the infrastructure are managed by following the Change Management process to ensure that the live environment is protected at all times.
• Ensure adherence to all IT policies, architectural standards and guidelines, operational processes and procedures including relevant build and security standards.
• Identify and manage problems assigned to you by mangers to conclusion
• Identifying and managing key risks within Infrastructure and Networking Services.

Person Specification

• Excellent communication, collaboration, reporting, analytical and problem-solving skills
• Be flexible when it comes to out of hours support. You will be required to be on-call some evenings and weekends as you will form part of an on-call rota. You may be asked to work out of core working hours to carry out change controls in agreed business maintenance windows.
• Have the drive to constantly improve and try out new technology offerings to improve operational efficiency and execution.
• Be keen to seek certification/qualification in relevant disciplines.
• Be confident in managing virtual platforms and the underpinning services such as Enterprise Storage, SD-Networking/SD-WAN.
• Be confident in managing peripheral infrastructure services such as Backup/Restore, non-native monitoring and hardware monitoring like Solarwinds and Zabbix to name a few.
• Have a good understanding of VMware, EMC and/or AWS cloud and other IasS solutions.
• Be keen to develop scripting capability and API integration in one or more popular languages. (Ansible/Shell/Python/Pearl/JavaScript/Ruby)

Technical Skills Required

• Theoretical knowledge of the OSI & TCP/IP models layers
• Understanding of IP, TCP and UDP
• Theoretical knowledge of routing protocols such as BGP, OSPF, CDP, STP, Mutlicast, ECMP to name a few
• Good understanding of VMware and/or AWS cloud.
• Microsoft and UNIX administration experience. (Ubuntu/Amazon Linux)
• Performance analysis and tuning, using built-in analysers to highlight issues and bottle necks
• Understand high availability architecture, backup and Disaster Recovery approaches and processes.
• A proven track record in an operational support capacity with good understanding of processes like incident, request, change and problem
• Understanding of security threats and methods to mitigate against them.
• Scripting skills to support automation of infrastructure related tasks including at least one programming language like Ruby and Python

Advantageous/Desirable/Beneficial

• Enterprise Storage/VDI/Web Tech (AWS)/Oracle/MSSQL
• Networking knowledge certifications, Infoblox
• Experience with VMware, Zabbix, ElasticSearch (ELK) and Puppet
• Windows and Ubuntu server administration
• Certifications in any of the above

Flexibility

• The successful candidate will understand that the team operate a shift covering 9am until 6pm Monday to Friday – flexibility to arrange or join shift when required is a must.
• On-call engineer will be on-call one week at a time and will be required to work from 6am-3pm Mon-Fri and on-call Mon-Sun out of hours.
• Infrequent (planned) travel might be required to other business destinations.

Our Commitment

We are committed to increasing diversity and maintaining an inclusive workplace culture. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates regardless of their age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race (which includes colour, nationality and ethnic or national origins), religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation.

We are Disability Confident Committed. Please let us know if you require any recruitment documentation in other formats or if you require reasonable adjustments to be made during the recruitment process. Please be assured that any such information will be held separately to your recruitment application and will not be considered as part of the selection process.