NOC System Administrator Zenimax Media
Rockville, MD

Job Description

Live Operations System Administrator

Bethesda Softworks is looking for a Live Operations System Administrator that will have a high sense of urgency and passion for fighting fires! As the front line supporting the online gaming experience your mission will be to ensure the game is up, fast, and if there is a problem it gets resolved as soon as possible. You will be the center of all communications and key to the success of our products. The NOC will coordinate several parties to ensure problems are avoided if possible or addressed quickly. This position will not only be focused on outages as there will be several opportunities to assist the engineering teams with projects. These opportunities are valuable in developing our NOC System Administrators and preparing them for their next position within the company. We see success in the NOC as a gateway to other opportunities in the company (network engineer, system engineer, DevOps, database etc.). You will keep the environment running by working with vendors and onsite staff to keep the servers stable and available

Responsibilities:

We expect the people we hire for this role will have the aptitude and aspirations to grow beyond the NOC role within 2 to 3 years. The successful candidate for this position will be capable of and motivated to learn on their own. This skill is essential to getting up to speed quickly and continuing to grow within the company. The ability to work well in a team environment and communicate effectively with people of varying technical knowledge is essential. We operate in an extremely fast-paced environment so the ability to prioritize quickly and follow documented processes and procedures will be required. We are supporting an MMO that needs to be availability 24/7 so schedule flexibility in this role will be needed to ensure our customers can always have access to a world-class gaming experience. At the end of the day, you will need to be confident in troubleshooting and supporting a large Linux environment with hundreds of servers across the globe.

At least a couple years of hands-on command line Linux experience will be necessary for this role. In order to be successful, you will also require basic networking and extensive Linux troubleshooting skills. You should also have experience maintaining server class machines and associated infrastructure. Our goal is for the NOC to solve 80% of the incidents that occur without having to escalate to other supporting teams. To meet this goal, we are looking for individuals that can think on their feet and have a solid foundation of core technology to isolate and repair issues as they arise.

Requirements:

* 2+ years of previous UNIX/Linux system administration experience
* Minimum 1 year of NOC or help-desk experience
* Strong interpersonal and communication skills; capable of writing technical documentation, public-facing communications, and interacting positively with upper management
* Familiarity with administrative work on Cloud platforms, AWS, Azure, GoogleCloud, etc.
* Independent problem-solving, self-direction
* Strong organizational skills and the ability to quickly assess and prioritize
* Comfortable with most aspects of operating system administration; for example, the configuration of mail systems, system installation, and configuration, fundamentals of security, installing third-party software
* Familiarity with fundamental networking/distributed computing environment concepts; can use nslookup or dig to check information in the DNS; understands basic routing concepts
* Familiarity with configuration management software, such as Salt, Chef, or Puppet

We prefer applicants for this position to have online or MMO or online gaming experience. It would also be preferred that candidates for this position will have familiarity with ITIL best practices concepts.