Sr. SAS Administrator (Azure)
Toronto, ON (2 days Onsite)
Key Responsibilities
- Lead administration, maintenance, and support of SAS 9.4 / Visual Analytics environments hosted on Microsoft Azure.
- Support end-to-end SAS platform architecture, ensuring scalability, resiliency, and operational stability.
- Manage Enterprise Deployment Pipeline (EDP) processes for server provisioning, automated deployments, environment refreshes, patching, and infrastructure changes.
- Lead Azure server build activities, including configuration, hardening, performance optimization, and lifecycle management.
- Plan and execute SAS platform upgrades, maintenance releases, hotfix installations, and validation activities across multiple environments.
- Administer and support Azure Application Gateway configurations, SSL certificates, DNS routing, load balancing, and secure web access to SAS applications.
- Develop automation solutions for deployment, monitoring, patching, backup, recovery, and operational support activities.
- Lead troubleshooting and root cause analysis for platform, infrastructure, performance, security, and application integration issues.
- Manage SAS Metadata, authentication mechanisms, service accounts, access controls, and integration with enterprise identity management platforms.
- Administer and support Lustre parallel file systems in large-scale Linux/Azure environments leveraging Lustre storage, including performance monitoring, capacity planning, storage expansion, and operational support.
- Collaborate with Cloud Engineering, Infrastructure, Network, Security, Architecture, and Application Development teams to deliver platform enhancements and operational improvements.
- Support platform standards, governance controls, operational procedures, and best practices.
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior administrators, support teams, and project resources.
- Lead disaster recovery planning, business continuity testing, and environment recovery exercises.
- Support regulatory, audit, and cybersecurity initiatives, ensuring timely remediation of vulnerabilities and compliance findings.
- Participate in production support rotations, major incident management, change implementation, and release management activities.
- Drive infrastructure automation and platform optimization strategies.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of SAS Platform Administration experience supporting enterprise SAS environments.
- 5+ years of experience supporting SAS platforms in Microsoft Azure.
- Strong experience with Enterprise Deployment Pipeline (EDP) for server builds, deployments, upgrades, and patching activities.
- Extensive experience performing SAS upgrades, maintenance releases, hotfix deployments, and platform migrations.
- Hands-on experience with Azure Virtual Machines, Application Gateway, Load Balancers, Virtual Networks, Key Vault, Storage Accounts, and Azure Monitor.
- Hands-on experience administering Lustre distributed file systems supporting SAS Grid and enterprise analytics environments, including performance tuning, capacity management, troubleshooting, and disaster recovery.
- Strong Linux/Unix administration and shell scripting experience.
- Experience with SSL certificates, web application configuration, and secure network architectures.
- Experience with DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure automation, and configuration management tools.
- Strong knowledge of high-availability, disaster recovery, backup, and recovery strategies.
- Proven ability to lead technical projects and drive cross-functional collaboration.
Preferred Qualifications
- SAS Certified Platform Administrator.
- Experience with SAS Grid Computing and SAS Viya administration.
- Experience with Azure DevOps, Terraform, Ansible, or Infrastructure-as-Code frameworks.
- Knowledge of PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Oracle, Databricks, and enterprise integration patterns.
- Experience supporting large-scale regulated environments with SOX, audit, and security compliance requirements.
Leadership Expectations
- Serve as the technical lead for SAS platform strategy and operational excellence.
- Drive continuous improvement, automation, and operational efficiency across the SAS platform ecosystem.
- Provide guidance, coaching, and technical mentorship to platform and support teams.
