Senior IT Administrator Job Description and Role Profile

The Senior IT Administrator is a senior technical role responsible for ensuring reliable, secure and resilient IT operations. This vacancy is suitable for experienced infrastructure professionals who can lead day to day systems administration, resolve complex incidents, and support projects to improve stability and performance. Candidates should be confident working with cross functional teams and mentoring junior engineers.

Senior IT Administrator Job Profile

The Senior IT Administrator provides technical leadership for the organisation's core infrastructure, ensuring servers, networks and services are available, secure and maintained in line with business needs. The role focuses on operational excellence, incident resolution, capacity planning and continuous improvement.

This position carries responsibility for implementing standard operating procedures, supporting change activities, and collaborating with IT and business stakeholders to align infrastructure initiatives with organisational priorities.

Senior IT Administrator Job Description

The Senior IT Administrator oversees daily administration of servers, network devices, storage and associated services, taking ownership of complex incidents and problems. The role requires proactive monitoring, patch and release management, backup and recovery oversight, and participation in operational on call rotas as required. The incumbent will work closely with IT managers and project teams to plan and deliver infrastructure changes with minimal disruption.

In this role you will define and maintain technical standards, produce and update documentation, and implement controls to protect systems and data. You will be expected to coach and mentor junior staff, contribute to capacity and performance reviews, and lead efforts to automate routine tasks and improve operational efficiency.

Regular communication with stakeholders at all levels is required to provide clear status updates, risk assessments and recommendations for remediation. The role also involves liaising with vendors and external service providers to ensure third party services meet agreed service levels.

Senior IT Administrator: Duties and Responsibilities

• Manage and maintain servers, virtual environments and storage to ensure availability and performance.
• Administer and monitor network infrastructure to maintain secure and reliable connectivity.
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for major outages and recurring issues.
• Plan and perform patching, updates and configuration changes with documented change control.
• Design, test and maintain backup and recovery processes to meet recovery objectives.
• Implement and enforce security controls and operational hardening for systems and services.
• Develop scripts and automation to reduce manual tasks and improve repeatability.
• Monitor system health and capacity, and recommend upgrades or scaling activities.
• Create and maintain technical documentation, runbooks and operational procedures.
• Support project workstreams, including migrations, deployments and infrastructure upgrades.
• Mentor and support junior administrators and provide technical guidance to the team.
• Manage vendor relationships for hardware, software and third party services where applicable.
• Ensure compliance with organisational policies, standards and regulatory requirements.
• Participate in on call rotas and provide out of hours support when necessary.

Senior IT Administrator: Requirements and Qualifications

• Degree or diploma in computing, information systems or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Typically five or more years of progressive experience in systems and network administration.
• Strong working knowledge of server and virtualisation concepts and lifecycle management.
• Solid understanding of networking fundamentals including routing, switching and security principles.
• Proven experience with backup, recovery and disaster recovery planning and testing.
• Demonstrable experience implementing security controls and participating in vulnerability remediation.
• Experience writing scripts or automation to support operational tasks and deployments.
• Familiarity with IT service management practices and change control processes.
• Excellent analytical and problem solving skills with attention to detail.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain technical issues to non technical stakeholders.
• Experience leading technical projects and coordinating cross functional activities.
• Ability to work independently, prioritise workload and adapt to changing business requirements.