Our client seeks a highly skilled WebSphere systems administration specialist with a minimum of 5 years experience skilled in SuSE Linux or RedHat, IBM WebSphere, and IBM Portal to assist in the support and maintenance of existing departmental systems. 3-5 years experience with HP Hardware/servers, VMware knowledge & experience. The position entails 24 x 7 monitoring of system infrastructure, creating reports when failure occurs; deploying, testing, performance tuning and administering the code changes to existing infrastructure. Main Duties: Configure and deploy enterprise applications Install, administer and configure WebSphere application server (WAS) and http server. Apply fix packs to application servers Configure SSl, Plugin, Security, etc. Use application server administrative tools to configure and manage enterprise applications Scripting JACL, Jython, Bash, Perl, Awk, Sed Install and administer portal (IBM Portal) and Tivoli Identity Management (TIM) Mandatory Skills/Experience: Knowledge on Clustering, High Availability and workload management Experience in upgrading WebSphere application servers Clear understanding of JDBC connection pool, thread pools, JVM heap, Class Loaders Ability to generate reports and troubleshoot system performance Ability to research open source technologies Excellent interpersonal relations, communications, people skills and a self-starter Desirable Skills/Experience: Ability to create and follow through on change control for any modifications to the agency's software or hardware infrastructure Familiarity with HP servers. Ability to install Linux OS and updating all the firmware needed to bring the server up to spec Ability to automate patching of Linux servers Experience in a corporate IT environment Experience in a customer-facing corporate environment Understanding of business process software Understand and experience in disaster recovery, backup and restore processes Special Requirements: This is a hybrid position where the candidate needs to have Excellent WebSphere administration skills in a SuSE Linux environment; DB2 skills will also prove to be very useful.