OVERVIEW

A thriving, mission-driven multimedia organization, NPR produces award-winning news, information, and music programming in partnership with hundreds of independent public radio stations across the nation. The NPR audience values information, creativity, curiosity, and social responsibility – and our employees do too. We are innovators and leaders in diverse fields, from journalism and digital media to IT and development. Every day, our employees and member stations touch the lives of millions worldwide.

Across our organization, we’re building a workplace where collaboration is essential, diverse voices are heard, and inclusion is the key to our success. We are committed to doing the right thing in our journalism and in every role at NPR. This means that integrity, adherence to our ethical standards, and compliance with legal obligations are fundamental responsibilities for every employee at NPR.

Intro to Position

NPR is seeking an experienced, technically rigorous Senior IT Systems Engineer to join our IT Systems team. In this role, you will serve as a primary technical lead responsible for the design, deployment, administration, and optimization of NPR’s core virtualized data center infrastructure. The ideal candidate brings deep, hands-on expertise in VMware vSphere, enterprise Storage Area Networks (SAN/NAS), and Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) environments.

You will play a critical role in ensuring the high availability, scalability, performance, and security of our enterprise systems while partnering across Technology to advance infrastructure modernization and automation initiatives in support of our nationwide public media mission.

Responsibilities

Data Center Architecture & Storage Administration

Architect Virtualized Infrastructure: Design, deploy, and manage core virtualized data center infrastructure, leading enterprise VMware vSphere environments, Cisco UCS compute platforms, and SAN/NAS storage arrays.
Administer Enterprise Compute & Storage: Execute routine server builds, security patch management, virtual machine lifecycle administration, and enterprise storage capacity allocation.
Advance Cloud & Hybrid Integration: Evaluate systems architecture and hybrid-cloud strategy, taking operational ownership of the maintenance and integration of cloud infrastructure (AWS or Azure).

Systems Governance & Disaster Recovery

Govern Disaster Recovery Strategies: Design, maintain, and rigorously test business continuity and disaster recovery strategies, including enterprise backups, data replication, and automated site failovers.
Manage Structured Change Processes: Recommend, test, and implement system enhancements in strict adherence to established organizational change management policies and procedures.
Publish System Documentation & SOPs: Author and maintain comprehensive systems architecture diagrams, standard operating procedures (SOPs), runbooks, and technical documentation for IT colleagues and system stakeholders.

Incident Escalation & Operational Automation

Lead Tier-3 Escalations & Root Cause Analysis: Serve as the senior technical escalation point for enterprise technology teams, isolating root causes and resolving complex production incidents.
Automate Infrastructure Operations: Design and execute automation scripts using modern scripting languages to streamline routine administrative tasks, infrastructure provisioning, and systems health reporting.
Maintain Operational Communications: Provide timely status reporting on system health to engineering leadership, manage incident response on a 24x7 rotation, and articulate outage impact clearly to technical and operational partners.

The above duties and responsibilities are not an exhaustive list of required responsibilities, duties and skills. Other duties may be assigned, and this job description can be modified at any time.

Minimum Qualifications

5+ years of dedicated experience as a Systems or Infrastructure Engineer supporting, administering, and troubleshooting systems in an enterprise data center environment.