Associate IT Network Engineer / Consultant

29 July 2024

Nims & Associates has an exciting opportunity for a seasoned IT professional to work with our existing medium and small business clients, as well as new opportunities. We are looking for a candidate who lives in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, has 5+ years of IT consulting and/or MSP experience, and maintains a strong background with extensive experience with Microsoft 365, Linux CentOS (RPM), and Cloud IaaS such as Azure and/or Amazon Web services. Candidate should also have Layer 2 (switching, subnetting, etc.) and Layer 3 (firewalls, routing, etc.) Networking skills. You will work primarily from home but must be able to travel regularly to client sites in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As a consultant, you will be responsible for architecting, recommending, and executing successful IT frameworks and fostering strong client relationships. You have effective communication skills, including the ability to convey complex technical concepts in a clear and engaging manner.

The rewards of joining Nims & Associates are great in both practical and personal terms. You will be joining a solid company with almost 40 years of history and stability. The average tenure of a Nims associate is over ten years. Founded in 1985, Nims & Associates is a full-service information technology firm serving clients in fifteen states, 30+ associates, and over 500 active clients, many with national operations. As consultants, we sell no computer hardware. Our job is to make our client's IT and ERP systems run better, and we must win their business with every interaction.

Our clients have between 5 and 500 employees. They want an IT partner that will treat them with respect. They want the job done right, on time, and within budget by someone that they trust. That's us. That's Nims & Associates. If you take pride and personal responsibility for your work, we want to know you.

Nims & Associates is unique in that we offer comprehensive support tailored to the needs of small and medium businesses. We do this by assigning a support team custom-tailored to each client's IT strengths and weaknesses. Our consultants remember that computers and software are less important than the people and businesses that use them.

After 39 years in business, two things haven't changed -

— We specialize in working with small and medium businesses with between 1 and 500 employees.

— We provide the best IT support services in the business. Our growth has come almost exclusively from client referrals.

Responsibilities include —

• Work with clients to determine needs and recommend IT solutions to meet business objectives
• Prepare detailed hardware and labor estimates, timelines, and budgets for projects
• Communicate value-add and benefits of IT projects
• Hands-on implementation of hardware, software, and user support
• Execution of project plans within time and budget constraints
• Integration of IT solutions into client business processes
• Reactive user hardware and support as needed
• Foster and grow client relationships through product adoption and revenue growth

Benefits include —

• Long-term, stable organization
• Work from home office
• Full Medical / Dental plan (employees)
• Bonuses based on performance/billings (employees)

Requirements —

• At least five years of equivalent work experience in a technical, analytical position responsible in a consultative position, architecting and implementing networks, applications, servers, virtualization, and storage.
• Strong experience in the deployment, management, and maintenance of Hypervisor Infrastructure, (Hyper-V, VMWare).
• Strong experience managing and implementing Microsoft Windows, M365, and Azure.
• Strong experience managing and implementing Linux RPM-based operating systems (CentOS / RedHat / Rocky distros).
• Strong experience implementing and administering Microsoft's Azure Entra ID managing Group Policy, DHCP, DNS, ADFS, and Remote Desktop Services.
• Strong experience in Layer 2 / Layer 3 Networking, wired and wireless; (Cisco switches / ASA, Palo Alto Firewalls, etc.)
• Strong experience managing and implementing SAN storage solutions; (NetApp Ontap, Compellent, Nimble, etc.)
• Strong experience managing and implementing storage and backup infrastructure; Rubrik Backup Solutions, Veeam, etc.
• Experience with Cloud platforms (AWS and Azure).
• Experience with Delinea / Centrify Server Suite
• Experience with SGE Grid, and Jenkins
• Experience with Atlassian / Jira / Confluence
• Experience with Perforce / GitLab / Github
• Must be willing to participate in an On-Call rotation schedule.
• Must be willing to work in an MSP environment.
• Understanding of ITIL and best practices related to IT Operations.
• Must be able to travel to client sites in the SF Bay Area as needed and nationally occasionally.

Certifications —

A successful candidate will have one or more of the following certifications —

• M365 Certified Associate Level or better
• AWS Associate Level or better

Any of the following additional certifications would be a plus —

• VMWare Network Virtualization – Technical Associate or better