Job description

Position Overview:

Duke Kunshan University is a joint-venture university created through a partnership among Duke University, Wuhan University, and the Municipality of Kunshan. The university’s success depends on a reliable, secure, and scalable IT infrastructure that supports world-class teaching, learning, research, and administrative services. The System Engineer IIIis a core member of the IT Infrastructure & Systems team and will be responsible for managing the university’s server, storage, and virtualization infrastructure, ensuring availability, performance, and security of critical systems. This role covers the full lifecycle of system administration, including planning, deployment, monitoring, patching, backup and disaster recovery, troubleshooting, and security hardening.

The System Engineer will play a critical role in managing and securing web platforms and assisting faculty and students with academic and research computing needs.

Reports to:

Associate Director of Technical Services

Essential Duties:

The System Engineer will be responsible for a wide range of duties, including but not limited to infrastructure & systems management, security & compliance, web & application services, and academic & research computing support:

1.       Administer, monitor, and maintain on-premises and cloud-based servers and virtualization platforms, ensuring high availability and performance of enterprise systems.

2.       Manage storage platforms and compute environments, including configuration, monitoring, troubleshooting, patching, upgrades, vulnerability remediation, and incident response.

3.       Collaborate with Duke IT to enforce system hardening, ensure best practices, and implement backup and disaster recovery solutions to ensure data protection and system resilience.

4.       Manage university web platforms, deploy and update applications and plugins, and optimize web servers and associated databases to ensure availability, performance, and security.

5.       Investigate new platforms, deploy unfamiliar software packages, and assist faculty and students in setting up specialized computing environments for teaching and research.

6.       Provide support for Windows and Linux-based systems, GPU clusters, and software environments to support academic, research, and administrative functions.

7.       Work closely with IT colleagues to ensure integration and enhane automation across networking, applications, and end-user services.

8.       Collaborate with information security and peer teams to fulfill system check and reporting requirements. Be ready to manage urgent or serious issues off normal working hours.

9.       Stay current with industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices in system administration, cloud computing, and cybersecurity.

10.   Perform other duties as assigned.

11.   University employees' job responsibilities will continue to expand in scope and depth as the University grows in size and complexity in its programs.

Skills & experience

Required Qualifications:

1.       Full-time bachelor’s degree or above, major in information technology, computer science, or a related field preferred.

2.       Minimum 5 years of experience in system administration, web management, or enterprise IT operations preferred.

3.       At least three years of experience in a higher education, research institutions, or multinational environments preferred.

4.       High proficiency in web platform architecture with practical experience in managing Drupal or WordPress core, theme, and plugin security updates and vulnerability remediation.

5.       Solid knowledge of web server administration (e.g., Apache and Nginx) and database systems (e.g., MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server).

6.       Familiarity with monitoring tools (e.g., Uptime, AWS CloudWatch) to track website performance and availability.

7.       Knowledge of web application security best practices and ability to mitigate vulnerabilities (e.g., XSS, SQL Injection, CSRF, etc.).

8.       Ability to perform log analysis and provide incident response, including handling website hacking, defacement, and malware injection.

9.       Strong knowledge of programming, scripting, and mockup languages (e.g., PHP, JavaScript, Python, Go, Shell, HTML5, CSS3) and other web technologies.

10.   Proficiency in Git for version control, able to manage code independently and collaborate effectively.

11.   Expertise in building and maintaining Windows and Linux (e.g., Ubuntu) systems.

12.   Familiarity with AWS cloud components (e.g., ALB, EC2, RDS, FSx, and S3).

13.   Proficiency in managing service profiles, firmware upgrades, policy configuration, and hardware replacement.

14.   Experience in the administration of enterprise storage and compute environments, such as EMC Unity and Cisco UCS Systems (e.g., UCS Manager, UCS Director, UCS Central).

15.   Proficiency in storage system installation and configuration, such as RAID configuration and Logical Volume Manager (LVM) setup.

16.   Familiarity with virtualization platforms (e.g., VMware Hyper-V, KVM, and vSphere).

17.   Experience in NVIDIA GPU driver installation, as well as setting up research computing environments (e.g., CUDA, cuDNN, Python, Anaconda, PyTorch, and TensorFlow).

18.   Strong oral and wirtten communication skills in both English and Chinese.

Preferred Qualifications:

1. Professional certifications such as AWS Solutions Architect, Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), VMware Certified Professional (VCP), or Cisco certifications (CCNP/CCIE).
2. Experience with security monitoring systems, Web Application Firewalls (WAF), and intrusion detection/prevention tools.
3. Hands-on experience with advanced monitoring and logging platforms (e.g., Splunk, ELK Stack, Prometheus, and Grafana).
4. Familiarity with containerization and orchestration platforms (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
5. Strong understanding of academic and research computing workflows, especially in data science and AI applications.

How to Apply:
Please submit your formal application by searching the position on DKU recruitment portal.