Careers

Job Summary:

The University Information Technology Services (UITS) department of the University of Massachusetts is seeking an experienced, energetic, engaging and visionary employee who wants to become part of an exciting, vibrant community of information technology professionals supporting the institution's mission, “To enable UMASS to provide an affordable and accessible education of high quality and to conduct programs of research and public service that advance knowledge and improve the lives of the people of the Commonwealth, the nation and the world.”

Information technology plays a vital and ever-expanding role in the institutional mission. The Institution's information technology environment is highly distributed and diverse, with strong leadership and coordination from the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and direct report units. We are seeking a strong, knowledgeable employee to provide vision, strategy, broad-based planning, and hands-on responsibility as a Principal Network Specialist.

Essential Functions:

The Principal Network Specialist is a technical role supporting network environments in a multi-platform, protocol and operating system environment.

• Provide technical support, integration and maintenance of advanced networking services, hardware components and associated software.
• Develop network management plans, budgetary requirements, and architectural assessments.
• Provide technical consultation for staff and users of the environments; helping to provide advanced design solutions, standards and procedures which include but are not limited to network integration projects, network performance analyses, problem resolution and network security initiatives.
• Participate in the physical planning of equipment. This includes physical rack design, power management and cabling.

Other Functions:

• Perform other duties as required

Minimum Qualifications (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Education, Experience):

• Bachelor’s degree in a technical, scientific or engineering discipline or equivalent work experience.
• 10 or more years of product evaluation and hands-on work experience in large networks with ability to solve complex problems in a multiple vendor, multiple customer environment.
• Network switch and routing knowledge, configuration and support experience.
• Ability to diagnose network connectivity status between IP nodes such as routers, servers, clients, etc;
• Monitoring network links for error and utilization rates, installing and managing routers and switches.
• Firewall functionality and operational support knowledge.
• Multi-Site VPN, SSL, DMZ, and remote authentication and authorization knowledge.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills with ability to develop and deliver presentations.
• Strong interpersonal skills with ability to work effectively with people of all levels of information technology expertise with a wide range of constituencies and organizational relationships.

Preferred Qualifications (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Education, Experience):

• Knowledge of high-performance networking architecture and data center protocols such as switching, routing, Ethernet Trunking, Spanning Tree Bridging and hardware load balancing.
• Advanced product technology certifications such as Amazon’s AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty, Cisco’s CCNP and CheckPoint’s CCSM.
• Advanced routing protocol experience with BGP, EIGRP and OSPF.
• Multi-site active/active and active/passive, highly virtualized data center experience which includes switching (Cisco and Nexus), load balancing (Citrix NetScaler), firewall services (Cisco’s ASA/FirePower and CheckPoint), high availability (HSRP, active/active and active/passive) and virtual routing (VRF and VPC).
• Working knowledge and experience with Cisco’s Nexus 7000 and 9000 series switches.
• Exposure to different software defined networking technologies which would include Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and VMWare’s NSX.
• Understanding and knowledge of networks within the different cloud deployment and service models.
• Certifications in AWS or Azure a plus
• Experience developing scripts or programs in Shell or Python.
• Advanced spanning tree knowledge including 802.1d, 802.1w, 802.1s and Cisco’s RPVST.
• Working knowledge and use of monitoring tools like ExtraHop, NagIOS, SolarWinds, Splunk, etc.

Working Conditions:

The job can require lifting pieces of equipment up to 50lbs.
The job can require some time working inside data centers for extended periods of time.
May require frequent off-hours work.
Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation.

Additional Details:

Salary commensurate with experience up to $140,000.