Senior Database Systems Engineer (SQL Server)

Established in 1875, Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) has long held an important presence in the educational and cultural landscape of one of the most famous and liveliest cities in the world. With its position within the top 40 largest universities in the country, LJMU is also one of the biggest employers in Merseyside. LJMU is an ambitious and forward-thinking institution that challenges convention and believes passionately in the concept of 'One University' - a community working together to achieve common student-centred objectives within a clear strategy. Our vision is to be recognised as a modern civic university delivering solutions to the challenges of the 21st century, and to deliver our mission of creating and sustaining a vibrant community for learning and knowledge where staff and students work together in an active and supportive partnership. We provide opportunities to enrich our students, partners and the wider society through education, training, research, scholarship and knowledge transfer. A robust and modern IT infrastructure is critical to the success of the University. The IT Services department supports a range of mission-critical services and systems and state of the art technical infrastructure that facilitates all aspects of teaching, learning, research and the day-to-day running of a large organisation. The University's distributed computing facilities provide approximately 5,000 PCs running circa 550 applications, with over 400 physical and virtual servers on the University network which is used by more than 25,000 students and 2,000 staff. The underlying infrastructure is based on the latest Windows Server and Red Hat Linux systems, running current versions of enterprise-class applications, such as Oracle E-Business Suite and Microsoft Dynamics. Thanks to an ambitious growth plan, focused on providing an exceptional student experience by providing high quality teaching supported by ground breaking research, LJMU is an exciting and challenging place to build a career. The University embraces technology to the positive advantage of staff, students and partners, and its IT function is looking to expand with the recruitment of a variety of roles, primarily associated with project delivery. Role Specific SQL Server sits at the heart of both commercial and in-house applications which form many mission critical services to LJMU. Services are delivered into both a traditional business environment, and one that is focused on the support of Teaching and Learning. The successful candidate will lead the SQL Server Database and Applications section which is part of the Infrastructure Group. The successful candidate will be responsible for all aspects of supporting, maintaining, optimising and upgrading the SQL Server Infrastructure. This currently includes SQL Server 2012, 2012R", 2014 and 2016 using a variety of resiliency models such as SQL Clusters, DAG groups and virtual High Availability Clusters on both VMWare and Hyper-V. The fully resilient systems are distributed between two geographically separate data centres. Storage is provided by a pair of replicated SANs. The role will involve the opportunity to work closely with colleagues responsible for application development and other aspects of service delivery, with the aim of sharing best practice and determining how SQL Server technologies can best be deployed to gain maximum benefit. To visit our website and apply for this role please click the APPLY button. Closing date: 23 October 2016. LJMU is committed to achieving equality of opportunity.