Senior Systems Analyst

About UMass Amherst

The flagship of the Commonwealth, the University of Massachusetts Amherst is a nationally ranked public land-grant research university that seeks to expand educational access, fuel innovation and creativity, and share and use its knowledge for the common good. Founded in 1863, UMass Amherst sits on nearly 1,450-acres in scenic Western Massachusetts and boasts state-of-the-art facilities for teaching, research, scholarship, and creative activity. The institution advances a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community where everyone feels connected and valued—and thrives, and offers a full range of undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees across 10 schools and colleges, and 100 undergraduate majors. We believe every member of our university community can contribute to our ongoing success by striving for the highest level of excellence as we seek breakthrough solutions to mounting environmental, social, economic, and technological challenges in our world. 

 

Job Summary

The Senior IT Systems Analyst consults with end users and stakeholders (Project Managers, Utilities & Maintenance Managers, UMass IT, vendors, etc.) and conducts technical analysis of systems and network communications to design, build, configure, implement, test and maintain systems.  Provides mentoring and training to IT system analysts and acts as primary technical resource for Help Desk staff and User Support Operations Manager.   Investigates problems with existing systems and delivers solutions while maintaining system compatibility and enabling integration. 

 

Essential Functions

• Analyzes application workflows to identify potential points of failure, especially those with possible life safety impacts. Recommends and implements applications, application configurations and procedures which mitigate operational and security risks.
• Ensures appropriate application availability, manageability, scalability and security by designing, implementing, maintaining, tuning and auditing applications and databases.
• Mentors and trains IT applications analysts to elevate the department’s ability to automate processes, integrate applications, and utilize the latest technology to increase efficiency with the use of ETL Tools (such as FME or Boomi) and scripting (such as SQL). Serves as primary applications resource for support technicians for complex problems and issues including configuring environments in which to test application compatibility and configurations and then developing a process to be used by staff to resolve issues.
• Works on multiple projects as a project leader to research, propose and implement strategies in the implementation, migration and upgrading of complex enterprise applications following a centralized enterprise model, including facilitating the configuration of networks and firewalls, migration of users and computers to new applications, migration of applications to centrally supported Microsoft SQL server database cluster, and migration of file server data.
• Analyzes application dependencies and develop and execute plans to migrate applications to new infrastructure such as virtual environments (VMware) and authentication systems (Active Directory, Azure, etc.).
• Keeps current with established and emerging computing technologies and techniques in order to recommend and utilize improvements to application manageability, configurations, integrations, and uptime.

 

Other Functions

Performs related duties as assigned or required to meet Department, Executive Area/Division, and University goals and objectives.

 

Minimum Qualifications (Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Education, Experience, Certifications, Licensure)

• Bachelor’s Degree and 4 years of experience in a broad range of computer technologies.  
  • An equivalent combination of education and experience (8 years total) will also be considered.
• Expertise in a broad array of computing platforms and/or systems within a distributed computing environment, including, but not limited to: workstation software/applications, particularly those which run under MS-Windows; physical and virtual guest server operating systems, particularly Windows 2008.  Must have practical experience with scripting languages such as powershell.
• Must have experience working with TCP/IP networking and an understanding of network firewalls.
• Demonstrated strong interpersonal skills; ability to establish and maintain harmonious relationships with co-workers and with a broad range of clients; ability to work well in a leadership role with peers.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively, in a hi