Netapp Storage Jobs in Houston, TX (NOW HIRING)

1. PURPOSE AND SCOPE
• 1.1. Objective: The purpose of this document is to define the expert-level technical criteria, structural engineering responsibilities, and leadership expectations for the Senior IT System Administrator role at Foxconn Industrial Internet.
• 1.3. Mission: The Senior System Administrator is responsible for designing, optimizing, and securing the organization's global enterprise server infrastructure, data storage, virtualization layers, and cloud ecosystems. Serving as the Tier-3 escalation point for all enterprise system issues, this role leads complex datacenter migrations, cloud-native transformations, and ensures business continuity across all production-critical systems.
2. CORE RESPONSIBILITIES
• Architecture & Infrastructure Design: Lead the design, sizing, implementation, and lifecycle management of enterprise server infrastructure, high-performance storage arrays (SAN/NAS), hyper-converged systems (HCI), and hybrid cloud environments.
• Tier-3 Escalation & Problem Management: Serve as the ultimate internal technical authority for complex server operating system anomalies, Active Directory forest-level issues, virtualization deadlocks, and critical storage failures. Lead root-cause analysis (RCA) and emergency recovery during high-priority (P1/P0) system outages.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & Automation: Drive the automation strategy for system provisioning, configuration management, and patching. Design, build, and maintain automation pipelines to eliminate manual overhead and enforce standard system baselines.
• Cloud & Hybrid Integration: Architect and manage enterprise workloads across public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure) and on-premises datacenters. Lead migrations from legacy infrastructures to highly redundant, cloud-native or hybrid models.
• Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (BC/DR): Design, implement, and periodically test enterprise-grade disaster recovery architectures, automated backup strategies, and multi-site replication policies to guarantee strict Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).
• Security hardening & Compliance: Oversee system security hardening in alignment with international standards (such as ISO 27001 or NIST). Manage enterprise identity services, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and patch compliance matrices across thousands of endpoints.
• Capacity Planning & Budget Input: Conduct technical audits and deep capacity analysis of compute, memory, and storage footprints. Provide data-driven recommendations and technical inputs for annual IT capital expenditure (CapEx) and operational expenditure (OpEx) budgeting.
05/2026 Senior System Administrator version 1.0
• Leadership & Mentorship: Establish corporate system engineering standards and approve technical Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Actively mentor and cross-train junior system administrators and network engineers to elevate overall team capabilities.
3. TECHNICAL QUALIFICATIONS
3.1. Education and Certification
• Academic Background: A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Management Information Systems, or a strictly related field is required.
• Professional Credentials: Active expert-level certifications are highly preferred, such as MCSE (Core Infrastructure), VMware VCP/VCAP (DCV), Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), or Professional Cloud Architect certifications (AWS Professional / Azure Solutions Architect Expert).
3.2. Enterprise Operating Systems & Directory Services
• Advanced Active Directory & IAM: Deep expertise in managing enterprise Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) in multi-domain/multi-forest environments, including Group Policy (GPO) architecture, trust relationships, Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS), and seamless synchronization with Azure AD / Entra ID.
• Linux/Unix Expertise: Expert-level administration of enterprise Linux distributions (RHEL, Ubuntu Server). Advanced mastery of performance tuning, kernel parameters optimization, systemd troubleshooting, and deep shell scripting (Bash).
• Windows Server Mastery: In-depth knowledge of Windows Server (2019/2022) clustering, Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), and advanced troubleshooting of core network services (DNS, DHCP, NPS) at scale.
3.3. Virtualization, Storage & Cloud Architecture
• Enterprise Virtualization: Expert-level configuration, management, and troubleshooting of VMware vSphere suites (vCenter, ESXi, vSAN, NSX). Proven experience deploying and maintaining high-availability (HA) clusters, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and live migration mechanics.
• Storage Area Networks (SAN/NAS): Advanced management of enterprise-grade storage hardware (e.g., Dell EMC, NetApp, Pure Storage) utilizing Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI, and NFS protocols. Designing robust multi-pathing (MPIO) and fabric configurations.
• Containerization & Orchestration: Foundational-to-advanced experience with Docker container environments and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes (K8s) or Red Hat OpenShift in a production setting.
05/2026 Senior System Administrator version 1.0
3.4. DevOps, Automation & Tooling
• Configuration Management: Mastery of configuration management and deployment automation tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Puppet, or Chef.
• Advanced Scripting: High proficiency in building robust scripts using PowerShell or Python to query APIs, automate auditing, and manipulate complex data structures.
• Enterprise Monitoring & Observability: Design and optimization of centralized monitoring systems (e.g., Zabbix, Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog) with customized alerting thresholds, log aggregation, and synthetic transactions monitoring.
4. PHYSICAL AND OPERATIONAL REQUIREMENTS
• Critical Infrastructure Availability: Flexibility to lead high-risk infrastructure upgrades during scheduled weekend maintenance windows. Must participate in a Tier-3 on-call rotation to support 24/7/365 production facility uptime.
• Datacenter Governance: Superior understanding of modern datacenter physics, including hot/cold aisle containment, power distribution unit (PDU) calculations, and thermal environmental optimization.
5. SECURITY & COMPLIANCE
• 5.1. Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA): Due to unrestricted privileged access (Domain Admin / Root) to critical intellectual property and industrial automation data, execution of a comprehensive NDA and IP agreement is mandatory.
• 5.2. Background Check: Must pass an extensive, executive-level pre-employment background and professional credential check.