Senior Systems Administrator (Virtualisation)

Asiera – Senior Systems Administrator (Virtualisation)

About Us

Formerly known as HEAnet and EduCampus, we have been supporting Ireland’s academic and research community since 1983. We are now proud to come together as one unified organisation. Our new name Asiera captures what drives us every day – Advancing Services for Irish Education, Research and Academia.

Every day, our national education and research network supports more than 1.3 million students and researchers and over 175,000 staff across Ireland’s schools, ETBs and higher education institutions – more than 1.5 million people in total. In addition, we provide mission-critical management information systems to over 140,000 students and 20,000 staff across Ireland’s universities, technological universities, institutes of technology and colleges.

In Asiera, we are building an end-to-end digital ecosystem for Irish education, one that connects, enables, and empowers learners and institutions to thrive in an increasingly digital world.

We are seeking an experienced Senior Systems Administrator who is proficient in virtualisation with an understanding of networks to join our Linux Administrators on our Systems Team on a permanent contract basis.

This role is primarily based at our Dublin 1 offices, but we are pleased to offer a flexible remote working arrangement. This allows you to work from home up to three (3) days a week. You will be expected to work at least two (2) days a week in the office, giving you the opportunity to enjoy a balanced and dynamic work environment.

As part of this role you will form part of our on-call rota.

What the Systems Team does

The Systems team drives the deployment and maintenance of Asiera'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 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), Wi-Fi roaming (eduroam), large file transfers, and video related services including video conferencing and, live & on-demand streaming.

What the Senior Systems Administrator does

As a Senior Systems Administrator you will be responsible for the design, operation and improvement of Asiera's virtualisation platforms and systems. You will work closely with your team of Linux SysAdmins and other technical teams, taking ownership of complex infrastructure challenges and contributing to the architectural decisions and reliability of the services we the Systems Team delivers.

In this role, you will lead the deployment, maintenance and optimisation of our VMware and NSX environments, ensuring they remain robust, scalable and aligned with best practice.

You will also provide guidance to colleagues, support major projects, and troubleshoot issues that span infrastructure, systems and applications. As a senior member of the team, you will champion documentation, knowledge sharing and continuous improvement, and participate in change management processes, helping to maintain high operational standards.

How we do it

Our company values underpin how we do things in Asiera. We believe in and live by our values and understand they are integral to making HEAnet a great place to work.

          COLLABORATION - EQUALITY & FAIRNESS - FUTURE FOCUSED - POSITIVE IMPACT

For further information about who we are and our core values, see https://www.heanet.ie/who-we-are

What you get from us

We promote a healthy work/life balance, and we take the care of our team members mental health seriously. Work outside of standard hours is rare and agreed in advance.

We value knowledge sharing and communication.  We have frequent team meetings combined with regular 1:1 catch-ups to make sure no one is hitting any roadblocks.

We encourage critical thinking and the exploration of new ideas. We often form cross-team special interest groups for specific topic discussions, both ongoing and for fixed projects.

Our Technology stack, current and in development:

• OS: Ubuntu / Debian / CentOS
• Virtualisation: VMWare NSX Datacentre
• Infrastructure: Physical Datacentres/ AWS / Azure
• Containerisation: Docker Swarm / Kubernetes (Rancher)
• Network: Optical (DWDM) / MPLS / IP / ISIS / BGP / VXLAN
• Databases: Percona
• Orchestration & Automation: Ansible / Foreman / Terraform / GIT
• Logging & Monitoring: Elastic (OpenSearch) / Icinga2 / Munin / Cacti

Company Benefits

• Flexible Work/Life Balance framework
• Flexible start/finish times
• Health insurance for employees
• Defined contribution pension scheme
• On-going wellbeing initiatives
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP)
• Tax Saver Ticket scheme
• Cycle to Work scheme
• Professional education support
• Comprehensive group and individual training & development initiatives

 What we need from you

Essential

• Experience building and maintaining VMWare infrastructure (stretched clusters), specifically NSX.
• Experience with network and Internet protocols and infrastructure (BGP/VxLAN).
• Significant Linux system administration experience. Covering areas such as OS configuration, high availability, LAMP stacks, application support, and scripting.
• Strong understanding of firewalls and load balancers.
• 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 knowledge.

Bonus points:

We don’t expect you to have experience in all of the following areas, but it would be a plus if you do:

• Kubernates (Rancher) experience, either building/maintaining or deploying services on.
• Database administration, preferably Percona (MySQL).
• Cloud deployment and administration.

More important information

At Asiera we celebrate diversity and understand how important it is to our ongoing success.  We would like to hear from candidates who are great at what they do and whose values align with ours.

If you need any adjustments made to the application or selection process so you can do your best, please let us know.

HEAnet are delighted to be awarded with the Ibec Keep Well Mark and Top 100 Companies Leading in Wellbeing. We take pride in developing, maintaining and enhancing our culture of wellbeing and continue to focus on this into 2026 and beyond.