What are the responsibilities and job description for the Systems Administrator position at Zanskar?
Role Overview
Title: Systems Administrator
Hours: Full-time; salaried
Location: Salt Lake City, UT (on-site, with hybrid flexibility)
Benefits Eligible: Yes
Manager: Head of IT
Mission – Why we exist and why we need you
Geothermal energy is the most abundant renewable energy source in the world. There is 2,300 times more energy in geothermal heat in the ground than in oil, gas, coal, and methane combined. However, historically it’s been hard to find and expensive to develop. At Zanskar, we’re using better technology to find and develop new geothermal resources in order to make geothermal a cheap and vital contributor to a carbon-free electrical grid.
The IT team keeps our geoscientists, engineers, and operations staff equipped, connected, and secure so they can focus on finding and developing the next generation of geothermal resources. As we grow, the Systems Administrator will take hands-on ownership of the systems our people depend on every day — their devices, accounts, network, and cloud tools — and help us scale that foundation reliably and securely.
Outcomes – Problems you’ll solve
Success in this role at six months looks like a device fleet and a set of core systems that largely run themselves — and a team that rarely has to wonder whether their tools will just work.
By then, you will have taken day-to-day ownership of endpoint management across our macOS and Windows fleet, standardizing enrollment, configuration, and patching through our MDM platform so that a new hire’s laptop is ready on day one and a departing employee’s access is cleanly revoked. You will be administering user identity and access through our single sign-on / identity provider — provisioning accounts, enforcing multi-factor authentication, and reasoning about least-privilege access across dozens of SaaS applications.
You will know our office network and security stack — firewall policy and VLAN segmentation, enterprise Wi-Fi, managed switching, and our zero-trust remote-access layer — well enough to triage and resolve issues on your own and to propose improvements before they become problems. And you will have partnered with the Head of IT on the larger initiatives that keep a fast-moving startup resilient: provisioning cloud and virtual-desktop resources for our technical teams, ensuring critical company data is backed up and recoverable, and steadily hardening our posture against real-world threats.
Above all, you will have shown that you can be handed an ambiguous problem and own it end to end.
Competencies – What we’re looking for
Zanskar is an equal-opportunity employer and complies with all applicable federal, state, and local fair employment practice laws.
Title: Systems Administrator
Hours: Full-time; salaried
Location: Salt Lake City, UT (on-site, with hybrid flexibility)
Benefits Eligible: Yes
Manager: Head of IT
Mission – Why we exist and why we need you
Geothermal energy is the most abundant renewable energy source in the world. There is 2,300 times more energy in geothermal heat in the ground than in oil, gas, coal, and methane combined. However, historically it’s been hard to find and expensive to develop. At Zanskar, we’re using better technology to find and develop new geothermal resources in order to make geothermal a cheap and vital contributor to a carbon-free electrical grid.
The IT team keeps our geoscientists, engineers, and operations staff equipped, connected, and secure so they can focus on finding and developing the next generation of geothermal resources. As we grow, the Systems Administrator will take hands-on ownership of the systems our people depend on every day — their devices, accounts, network, and cloud tools — and help us scale that foundation reliably and securely.
Outcomes – Problems you’ll solve
Success in this role at six months looks like a device fleet and a set of core systems that largely run themselves — and a team that rarely has to wonder whether their tools will just work.
By then, you will have taken day-to-day ownership of endpoint management across our macOS and Windows fleet, standardizing enrollment, configuration, and patching through our MDM platform so that a new hire’s laptop is ready on day one and a departing employee’s access is cleanly revoked. You will be administering user identity and access through our single sign-on / identity provider — provisioning accounts, enforcing multi-factor authentication, and reasoning about least-privilege access across dozens of SaaS applications.
You will know our office network and security stack — firewall policy and VLAN segmentation, enterprise Wi-Fi, managed switching, and our zero-trust remote-access layer — well enough to triage and resolve issues on your own and to propose improvements before they become problems. And you will have partnered with the Head of IT on the larger initiatives that keep a fast-moving startup resilient: provisioning cloud and virtual-desktop resources for our technical teams, ensuring critical company data is backed up and recoverable, and steadily hardening our posture against real-world threats.
Above all, you will have shown that you can be handed an ambiguous problem and own it end to end.
Competencies – What we’re looking for
- Endpoint & identity management: You’re fluent with MDM software for managing a cross-platform (macOS and Windows) device fleet — enrollment and zero-touch provisioning, configuration profiles, full-disk encryption with key escrow, and silent app deployment. You’re equally comfortable administering a cloud identity provider / SSO, including MFA, SAML and SCIM integrations, and joiner/mover/leaver lifecycle workflows. This is a required, hands-on skill, not a nice-to-have.
- Networking & infrastructure: You can stand up and troubleshoot the building blocks of a modern office and remote network — next-generation firewalls, VLAN segmentation, enterprise wireless, managed PoE switching, and VPN or zero-trust network access for remote and contractor connectivity. You read logs and packet captures without flinching.
- Cloud & SaaS administration: You’ve administered public cloud (IaaS) resources and a cloud productivity & collaboration suite at an organizational level — managing users, groups, sharing and permissions, and service configuration — and you understand how virtual desktops and SaaS apps fit into a secure, well-governed environment.
- Scripting & automation: You reach for a scripting language (e.g., PowerShell, Bash, or Python) before you reach for a repetitive manual process. You can package and deploy software at scale, automate routine administration, and you’re comfortable with version control and infrastructure-as-code concepts.
- AI & integration: You're comfortable putting modern AI tools to work on the team's behalf, and wiring them into our day-to-day business processes. You have good judgment about where automation helps, and where a human still belongs in the loop.
- Security-minded and self-directed: You think about backup and recovery, vendor risk, and attack surface as a matter of habit, and you keep up with how real incidents actually happen. Just as important, you thrive with autonomy: in a small, well-funded startup you’ll often be the only person on a given problem, trusted to research the options, make a recommendation, and execute.
- The position is located in Salt Lake City, UT (on-site, with hybrid flexibility)
- Full-time; salaried
- Paid holidays
- 18 days PTO PTO accrual increase based on tenure
- Medical, Dental & Vision coverage
- Short Term & Long Term Disability
- Group & Supplemental Life Insurance
- Equity Packages
- 401k
- Paid Parental Leave
- A direct impact in displacing carbon emissions, and growth opportunities in a growing startup environment
Zanskar is an equal-opportunity employer and complies with all applicable federal, state, and local fair employment practice laws.