This is a remote role that may only be hired in the following location(s): Arizona, North Carolina and Texas.
We are seeking a highly experienced Senior AIX Systems Administrator to join our Platform Computing Operations team supporting critical banking platforms. This role is responsible for the administration, maintenance, security, performance, and availability of IBM Power Systems and AIX environments that support mission-critical financial applications. The ideal candidate will possess extensive hands-on experience across all facets of AIX administration, IBM Power hardware management, virtualization technologies, disaster recovery, automation, and regulatory compliance requirements within highly regulated industries such as banking and financial services.
This position participates in an on-call rotation and must be available to provide 24x7 operational support for production incidents, maintenance events, and critical business initiatives.
Responsibilities
AIX System Administration
- Administer, configure, maintain, and troubleshoot IBM AIX operating systems across production, development, testing, and disaster recovery environments.
- Perform installation, upgrades, patching, and lifecycle management of AIX systems.
- Monitor system performance and capacity, proactively identifying and resolving infrastructure issues.
- Manage file systems, storage allocation, volume groups, logical volumes, and system resources.
- Perform performance tuning and optimization of AIX operating environments.
IBM Power Systems Administration
- Manage IBM Power servers, including Power9, Power10, and future platforms.
- Administer Hardware Management Consoles (HMCs), firmware upgrades, and hardware maintenance activities.
- Configure and support LPARs, virtual I/O servers (VIOS), shared processor pools, and virtualization technologies.
- Coordinate hardware refreshes, migrations, and capacity planning activities.
Security, Risk & Compliance
- Ensure system configurations comply with banking regulatory, audit, and cybersecurity requirements.
- Support internal and external audits and remediation efforts.
- Implement security hardening standards, vulnerability remediation, and patch management processes.
- Maintain compliance with applicable frameworks and standards including:
- FFIEC guidance
- PCI-DSS
- SOX controls
- NIST standards
- CIS Benchmarks
- Enterprise Information Security policies
Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity
- Support high-availability configurations and business continuity initiatives.
- Participate in recovery exercises and document recovery procedures.
Automation & Operational Excellence
- Develop and/or troubleshoot automation scripts using Shell, KornShell (ksh), Perl, Python, or equivalent tools.
- Create and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, and operational procedures.
Incident & Problem Management
- Serve as an escalation point for complex AIX and Power Systems issues.
- Lead root cause analysis activities, including associated documentation, and implement corrective actions.
- Partner with application, database, storage, network, and security teams to resolve infrastructure issues.
On-Call Support
- Participate in a rotating 24x7 on-call support schedule.
- Respond to critical production incidents during evenings, weekends, and holidays as required.
- Support planned maintenance activities outside normal business hours.
Change Management
- Participate in change management processes and meetings
- Coordinate maintenance outages with application teams
- Execute platform upgrades and lifecycle management
- Package and deploy third party software
- Plan and execute system and platform migrations
Governance, Standards & Compliance
- Conduct IAM reviews and manage deviations
- Perform audit issue remediation management
- Conduct baseline reviews and ongoing maintenance
Qualifications
Bachelor's Degree and 6 years of experience in Systems engineer and systems programmer OR High School Diploma or GED and 10 years of experience in Systems engineer and systems programmer
Preferred Qualifications:
- 10+ years of enterprise-level AIX administration experience supporting mission-critical environments.
- 10+ years of hands-on experience supporting IBM Power Systems hardware platforms.
- Expert-level knowledge of:
- IBM AIX 7.x
- IBM Power Systems (Power9, Power10)
- Hardware Management Console (HMC)
- Virtual I/O Server (VIOS)
- PowerVM Virtualization
- Logical Partitioning (LPAR)
- Network Installation Manager (NIM)
- Advanced experience with:
- SAN storage and multipathing
- TCP/IP networking, DNS, LDAP, SSH, and NTP
- Backup, recovery, and disaster recovery solutions
- Performance monitoring, tuning, and capacity management
- Strong Unix Shell Scripting expertise (ksh, bash, and sh) with the ability to develop, maintain, and troubleshoot complex automation scripts supporting enterprise operational processes, system administration, monitoring, reporting, and application support functions.
- Demonstrated experience developing and maintaining Ansible playbooks, roles, inventories, and automation workflows to support server provisioning, configuration management, patch deployment, compliance remediation, and operational standardization across AIX environments.
- Experience supporting systems within highly regulated industries, preferably banking or financial services.
- Working knowledge of regulatory and compliance requirements, including:
- FFIEC
- PCI-DSS
- SOX
- NIST Security Framework
- CIS Benchmarks
- Experience supporting high-availability and disaster recovery configurations.
- Strong troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and problem-solving skills.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to interact effectively with auditors, vendors, application teams, and senior leadership.
Preferred Areas of Experience:
- Experience supporting banking core applications and payment platforms.
- Experience with Ansible, Terraform, or other automation platforms.
- Experience with enterprise monitoring solutions.
- Familiarity with Red Hat Linux administration.
Key Competencies:
- Ownership and accountability
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
- Attention to detail
- Risk awareness and security mindset
- Customer service orientation
- Ability to perform effectively under pressure
- Strong collaboration and leadership skills
Benefits are an integral part of total rewards and First Citizens Bank is committed to providing a competitive, thoughtfully designed and quality benefits program to meet the needs of our associates. More information can be found at https://jobs.firstcitizens.com/benefits.
