What are the responsibilities and job description for the Systems and Network Administrator position at Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA)?
Company Description
The Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) is an independent analysis and research group based at the University of California's San Diego Supercomputer Center. CAIDA investigates both practical and theoretical aspects of the Internet, with particular focus on topics that are macroscopic in nature and provide enhanced insight into the function of Internet infrastructure worldwide, improve the integrity of the field of Internet science as well as the integrity of operational Internet measurement and management, and inform science, technology, and communications public policies.
Role Description
The Systems and Network Administrator will apply skills as an experienced systems infrastructure professional with a strong understanding of Internet infrastructure measurement opportunities: Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing, Domain Name System (DNS), and an understanding of industry best practices in these areas for the Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) program at UCSD/SDSC. They will design, deploy, manage, enhance, maintain and document large-scale data and compute solutions, including computer systems, networking, security, and writing and executing of complex scripts to build and sustain the infrastructure that supports Internet measurement research with evolving cybersecurity and networking needs. They will also design and implement continuous integration/deployment workflows with Ansible infrastructure-as-code (IaC), selects and design, implement and automate processes such as vantage point onboarding and outage notifications; and selects big data systems like Apache Kafka for large-scale analysis to facilitate security research use of large data archives. Also, the incumbent will perform simple to moderate cost/benefit analyses in the development of measurement instrumentation and data capture, management, processing, and dissemination systems; as well as develop, implement, and deploy virtualization solutions for measurement and analysis software capabilities. The incumbent will also build dashboards to aggregate and correlate usage statistics across data sets and time, manage external requests (e.g., BGP peering), deploy new vantage points with IPv6 support, resolve connectivity issues, migrating collectors to virtual machines, and maintain monitoring through alerts, access controls, and Grafana dashboards. The Systems and Network Administrator will also create new metadata and schemas for existing community data sets, including for integration of data into cloud platform technologies as well as enable cloud-based data access, develops schemas for BGP data, and supports compute/storage clusters for Internet Health Report activities.
Additionally, the incumbent will perform complex security control activities through firewalls and permissions, maintains hardware/software inventories and vantage point databases, produces internal and public-facing documentation, and tracks usage statistics as well as manage community software issues and task prioritization based on community workshops and meetings. They will also provide user support through ticketing systems, develop virtualization solutions, manage community software priorities, and architect metadata and schemas for integrating community data sets into cloud platforms—combining technical expertise with outreach to the broader research community.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in related area and / or equivalent experience / training.
- Understanding of system performance monitoring and actions that can be taken to improve or correct performance. Ability to develop and maintain Grafana dashboards for real-time statistics and reporting, including the integration of diverse data sources and the design of clear, user-focused visualizations to support operational decision-making.
- Demonstrated experience writing and editing complex scripts used to perform system maintenance and administration. Solid experience in the development, modification, maintenance, and debugging of scripts and programs used in the automation of various system management tasks, including installation, configuration, and monitoring. In-depth experience in both the interactive and programmatic use of at least one modern Unix shell scripting language (e.g., sh, bash). Proven ability to understand, write, debug, and maintain functional and potentially complex scripts in typical administrative languages (e.g., shell, Perl, Python, PHP). Experience in the use of all commands and utilities commonly used in the course of Unix system administration. Experience in the application of common Unix file/data processing commands, e.g., sed, awk, grep, and related utilities.
- Advanced knowledge of computer security best practices and policies including demonstrated experience securing server-based software. Experience performing certificate authority support.
- Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) implementations (e.g., Ansible, AWS CloudFormation, Azure).
- Demonstrated strong experience with setup, operation and maintenance of Unix operating systems (specifically, Ubuntu).
- Job offer is contingent upon satisfactory clearance based on Background Check results.