Senior System Administrator

In more than 75 years as an established, family-owned company, Raymour and Flanigan has grown into the largest furniture retailer in the Northeast with more than one hundred showrooms in eight states, and we are continually expanding our territory. We have a solid foundation of experienced IT professionals with expertise in harnessing and maximizing organizational processes and their associated information to solve a wide variety of complex business needs.

The sustained growth and strength of Raymour and Flanigan requires us to continually Raise the Bar in the search for motivated and driven people to join our team. To those candidates selected, we offer stable employment, a strong compensation and benefits package, and a high-energy work environment. More importantly, we provide opportunities to learn and grow, and our end objective is to build a team of highly skilled technology professionals who can support business needs and develop into qualified professionals we may consider for future roles in the Raymour and Flanigan management and executive teams.

Position Overview

Raymour & Flanigan's Systems Team is looking for a Senior Systems Administrator who is a positive influence and can provide advanced technical leadership, expertise, and guidance to continue the team's role of excellence. The Senior Systems Administrator is responsible for the design, deployment, administration, modernization, and lifecycle management of enterprise systems architecture, including datacenter infrastructure, virtualization platforms, storage systems, application provisioning, data protection, and related infrastructure services.

This position serves as a senior technical resource and escalation point for complex infrastructure challenges. The ideal candidate has direct experience designing, building, and managing datacenter environments; extensive hands-on experience with virtualization and application delivery platforms; strong knowledge of storage technologies and protocols; and the ability to mentor others while developing creative, practical solutions to existing business and technology challenges.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities

• Lead the design, implementation, administration, and modernization of enterprise datacenter infrastructure, including compute, storage, virtualization, application delivery, backup, and supporting systems platforms.
• Plan, coordinate, and perform system maintenance, software installations and upgrades, patch management, infrastructure lifecycle activities, and documentation.
• Work with the Systems Team to regularly update and adjust the technology strategic plan to assure systems architecture remains aligned with business objectives, operational priorities, security requirements, and long-term growth.
• Design, deploy, manage, and troubleshoot enterprise storage platforms, including SAN, NAS, object storage, replication, snapshot, and backup-related technologies.
• Maintain strong working knowledge of storage protocols and access methods, including Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, SMB/CIFS, and S3-compatible object storage.
• Design, administer, and optimize enterprise virtualization and application provisioning platforms, including server virtualization, virtual desktop infrastructure, application delivery, and related management tools.
• Lead capacity planning, performance monitoring, availability analysis, and lifecycle planning for systems, storage, virtualization, and datacenter platforms.
• Conduct hardware and software research and evaluations to determine whether proposed solutions will deliver business value, improve reliability, reduce risk, and meet operational needs.
• Identify recurring operational challenges and develop creative, sustainable solutions that improve stability, efficiency, security, automation, and supportability.
• Work with the Systems Team to automate regular management tasks, streamline processes, and improve operational consistency.
• Serve as a senior technical escalation point for complex systems, storage, virtualization, application provisioning, access, performance, and availability issues.
• Mentor Systems Administrators and other technical team members by sharing knowledge, providing technical guidance, reviewing solutions, and helping develop team skills in datacenter, storage, virtualization, and automation disciplines.
• Support user and business needs, including troubleshooting, account maintenance, technical consultation, and training as appropriate.
• Maintain and monitor systems in a 24 x 7 environment to assure they are operating at optimal efficiency, availability, and performance.
• Establish system specifications by conferring with users, analyzing workflow, access, information, security, and operational requirements, and designing appropriate system infrastructure.
• Secure systems by developing system access, monitoring, control, evaluation, documentation, and continuous-improvement practices.
• Lead and participate in the conceptual phases of identifying and solving business problems and technology initiatives.
• Work with business departmental teams to help define and document business requirements for systems, applications, metrics, reports, and infrastructure services.
• Participate in disaster recovery and business continuity planning, documentation, testing, and execution for assigned systems and platforms.
• Update job knowledge by participating in educational opportunities; reading professional publications; maintaining personal networks; and participating in professional organizations.
• Always act and communicate with internal customers professionally and with an empathetic customer-centric attitude.
• Perform additional functions that may be assigned at the discretion of management.

Required Skills and Experience

• Associate or bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, System Administration, or a closely related field, or equivalent experience required.
• 8+ years of progressively responsible systems administration, infrastructure administration, or related enterprise technology experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, administering, and managing enterprise datacenter infrastructure.
• Extensive experience with enterprise virtualization platforms such as VMware vSphere, VMware Horizon, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, Azure Stack HCI, or equivalent technologies.
• Extensive experience with application provisioning, virtual desktop infrastructure, application delivery, and workload placement across on-premises and cloud-connected environments.
• Direct experience with enterprise storage platforms and technologies, including SAN, NAS, object storage, replication, snapshots, backup architectures, and storage capacity planning.
• Strong understanding of storage protocols including Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, SMB/CIFS, and S3-compatible object storage.
• Strong knowledge of systems and networking software, hardware, operating systems, networking protocols, security, storage, data protection, and disaster recovery practices.
• Experience with scripting, automation tools, infrastructure reporting, and repeatable operational processes.
• A proven history of developing and implementing IT strategy, infrastructure plans, lifecycle management practices, and technical standards.
• Ability to create and map business needs and application requirements to practical, secure, supportable technical solutions.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects, coordinate technical efforts across teams, and influence infrastructure direction without requiring direct management authority.
• Experience mentoring administrators, engineers, and technical staff on systems, storage, virtualization, application provisioning, troubleshooting, and operational best practices.
• Exceptional analytical, troubleshooting, debugging, and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent communication and documentation skills, including the ability to communicate effectively with IT team members, business stakeholders, vendors, and leadership.
• Microsoft Active Directory, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP, and identity-related administration.
• Microsoft Windows Server 2016, 2019, and 2022 administration.
• UNIX/Linux experience.

Helpful Skills and Experience

• VMware, Citrix, Nutanix, Hyper-V, Azure Stack HCI, or equivalent virtualization and application delivery experience.
• Virtual desktop management and application provisioning experience.
• Microsoft Exchange or Exchange Online administration experience.
• IIS deployment and integration experience.
• Integration of business-related software and enterprise application platforms.
• Working knowledge of endpoint management, monitoring, and operations tools such as SCCM, SCOM, ManageEngine, SNMP, WMI, or equivalent technologies.
• Working knowledge of networking concepts, firewall coordination, load balancing, routing, switching, VLANs, and datacenter connectivity.
• Installation, configuration, and maintenance of virtualization clients, agents, management tools, and supporting infrastructure components.
• Email support systems such as spam filtering, archiving, retention, and mobile-device email access.
• Performance and utilization monitoring technologies such as SNMP and WMI.
• Microsoft SQL knowledge and experience a plus.
• Linux/Unix knowledge and experience a plus.
• PowerShell, scripting, automation, and infrastructure-as-code experience a plus.

Leadership and Professional Competencies

• Provides senior-level technical leadership, guidance, and accountability for assigned infrastructure platforms and initiatives.
• Mentors others by developing team knowledge, improving documentation, sharing best practices, and helping team members grow technically.
• Translates business objectives into secure, reliable, scalable, and manageable infrastructure solutions.
• Balances cost, risk, performance, security, supportability, and long-term maintainability when recommending solutions.
• Proactively identifies risks, technical debt, inefficiencies, and improvement opportunities.
• Demonstrates ownership of complex technical problems from discovery through resolution.
• Drives innovation and continuous improvement through creative thinking, automation, modernization, and practical problem solving.
• Communicates clearly and professionally with executives, business leaders, vendors, internal customers, and technical teams.

Raymour & Flanigan proudly supports a drug and smoke free work environment.

Please note that we are currently unable to offer visa sponsorship for this position. Candidates must have authorization to work in the U.S. without the need for sponsorship now or in the future.

Raymour & Flanigan is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer that does not discriminate against any associate or applicant on the basis of race, creed, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), age, national origin, physical or mental disability, status as a victim of domestic violence, sexual orientation, sexual and other reproductive health decisions, marital or familial status, genetic information or other basis protected by law.