Senior IT Specialist

About the role

Diverse Agile Solutions is seeking a Senior IT Specialist to support the New York State Department of Labor’s hybrid computing environment in Albany, New York. This hybrid contract role provides senior-level operating system and platform administration across Windows, Linux, and Kubernetes environments hosted on premises and in the cloud. The position supports the systems administration and platform management architecture sustaining the UISIM system following go-live, with a focus on reliable operations, security, and high availability. The specialist works within the ITS Office of the CTO, CPEO Site Reliability Engineering organization and coordinates closely with State technical staff.

Key responsibilities

• Administer Windows Server and Linux operating systems across on-premises, virtualized, and cloud-hosted environments, including installation, configuration, patching, hardening, and version upgrades.
• Manage enterprise virtualization and hypervisor platforms, including host configuration, virtual machine provisioning, and storage, network, and resource assignment.
• Administer Kubernetes clusters supporting UISIM workloads, including node provisioning, component upgrades, and container platform troubleshooting.
• Configure and review privileged and administrative access controls; coordinate elevated account requests with Agency database and security staff; apply security baselines and remediate vulnerability scan findings.
• Monitor system capacity, performance, and availability using Agency tools; tune resources and resolve incidents and service requests during scheduled work hours.
• Implement and validate high-availability configurations, including clustering, failover, replication, and backup and restore testing.
• Write and maintain automation and configuration management scripts, and execute change requests within approved change windows.
• Document root causes and corrective actions and maintain technical documentation, including system diagrams, operational procedures, and configuration records.
• Provide guidance and knowledge transfer to State technical staff as directed by the State Project Manager, and participate in recurring status meetings to report progress, risks, and issues to State supervisory staff.

Required qualifications

• 60–84 months of relevant experience. The candidate can work independently without assistance, provides guidance to others, and may have advanced education.

Preferred qualifications

• 84 months administering Windows Server operating systems in an enterprise environment.
• 84 months administering enterprise Linux server operating systems such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE, or Ubuntu, including installation, configuration, patching, and version upgrades.
• 60 months administering Kubernetes or an equivalent container orchestration platform, including cluster provisioning, component upgrades, and troubleshooting.
• 72 months administering server operating systems in public or private cloud environments such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud Platform.
• 72 months implementing and maintaining server high availability, including clustering, failover, replication, or backup and restore.
• 72 months configuring and administering privileged and administrative access.
• 60 months using infrastructure automation or configuration management tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Terraform, PowerShell, or Bash to provision or administer servers.
• 60 months applying security baselines and remediating vulnerability scan findings.
• 60 months using enterprise monitoring and alerting tools to track server capacity, performance, and availability.
• 72 months administering enterprise virtualization or hypervisor platforms such as VMware vSphere/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Proxmox VE, Nutanix AHV, or Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, including host configuration, VM provisioning, storage and network assignment, and resource management.

Work arrangement and compensation

• Hybrid position based in Albany, New York. Hourly compensation range: $26.80–$28.50.