Senior Systems Administrator

Location: Vancouver / Lower Mainland, BC

Base salary: CAD $105,000-$155,000 annually

Based on experience and capability. Upper range, and even higher compensation levels achievable through performance incentives.

Work arrangement: Approximately 70-80% remote

Position: Full-time

Schedule: Monday to Friday, 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM Pacific

Client work target: Approximately 80-90 billable hours per month, averaged annually

High technical standards. A sustainable workload. Ownership of your work.

Silver Networks is looking for a hands-on Senior Systems Administrator to build, deploy, and support complete small-business IT environments, typically serving 1-100 users.

We want someone who takes pride in doing things properly: assembling reliable hardware, configuring systems carefully, investigating unfamiliar problems, and seeing a job through to a tested, documented, and supportable result.

Our core product line and infrastructure designs are already established. Your role is to implement and support those designs, understand inherited environments, and migrate clients to our standards. You are not expected to be the company's primary infrastructure designer.

Work from home, with hands-on work when needed

Approximately 70-80% of the work is expected to be remote, and working from home is welcome. In-person hardware work and client visits will still be required, so you must be able to attend locations in the Vancouver / Lower Mainland area.

The remote portion will vary with project requirements. This is a predominantly remote position, not a fully remote role.

Take ownership from start to finish

When you take on a job, we expect you to actively move it toward completion rather than wait for someone else to direct every step.

That means understanding the scope, identifying dependencies, preparing the work, coordinating with clients or vendors, completing the implementation, verifying the result, and leaving clear documentation. Keep the client and your colleagues informed, follow up on outstanding items, and make sure responsibilities are clear before closing the job.

You do not need to know everything. You do need to be resourceful: consult documentation, research unfamiliar issues, test your assumptions, and use appropriate tools to work through problems.

Recognizing when to ask for input is part of good judgment. Raise blockers and risks early, explain what you have investigated, and suggest a sensible next step.



Ownership does not mean making unapproved changes or struggling silently.

A sustainable approach to workload

Our planning target is approximately 80-90 billable client hours per month, averaged across the year, rather than an inflexible monthly quota. Expectations account for leave, available client work, and assigned internal responsibilities.

We deliberately leave room for technical research, lab testing, professional development, documentation, automation, and experimentation. These are part of your paid work, not activities you are expected to fit into evenings and weekends.

We evaluate success through implementation quality, sound judgment, client communication, follow-through, and useful improvements, alongside billable work.

Regular hours are Monday to Friday, 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM Pacific. Evening and weekend work is not required.

What you will do

- Build and validate PCs and servers. Perform high-quality assembly, component installation, cable management, firmware configuration, storage setup, diagnostics, and stability testing.
- Deploy virtualization and Windows infrastructure. Configure hypervisors, virtual networking, storage, guest operating systems, Windows Server, Active Directory, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP, file services, and permissions.
- Install and migrate on-premises Exchange. Deploy Microsoft Exchange Server Subscription Edition from scratch and carry out supported upgrades and migrations, including preparation, configuration, testing, and post-migration validation.
- Configure and support business networks. Work with firewalls, switches, VLANs, VPNs, wireless networks, workstations, business applications, and related Microsoft 365 and Azure services.
- Implement dependable backup and recovery. Configure and monitor on-site and off-site backups, investigate failures, test restores, and maintain useful recovery procedures.
- Support inherited environments and complete migrations. Investigate legacy or third-party configurations, identify risks and dependencies,



and migrate clients to our established platforms with appropriate testing and documentation.

What you will bring At least five years in senior-level technical positions, including personally setting up business networks from scratch and supporting them substantially end-to-end over several years. Five years of general IT experience alone does not satisfy this requirement.

You should have strong practical experience with hardware, virtualization, Windows infrastructure, networking, and backup recovery. You must be comfortable both deploying recent systems and troubleshooting environments you did not build.

Hands-on on-premises Exchange installation and migration experience is required, together with familiarity with Exchange SE. Microsoft 365 or Exchange Online administration alone is not a substitute.

You should also bring working familiarity with Microsoft 365 and Azure, explicit communication, careful documentation habits, and the ability to organize and progress your work without constant supervision.

Experience with Proxmox VE, Proxmox Backup Server, TrueNAS/ZFS, pfSense, Linux, BSD, and PowerShell is an asset. Demonstrated capability matters more than a long certification list.

AI is an expected part of the job

We see AI as an important part of the future of technical work and expect its active use as a productivity multiplier.

You should already be using AI meaningfully for activities such as technical research, troubleshooting, scripting, documentation, or workflow improvement, and be interested in developing those capabilities further.

You remain responsible for understanding and validating the results. Check recommendations, test code and changes, and protect credentials and confidential client information when using approved tools.

Technical scrutiny is welcome. A willingness to learn, experiment, and incorporate useful AI tools into your work is required.

How to apply

Apply through Indeed with your resume and a brief description of a business network deployment or migration you personally owned from preparation through completion and subsequent support. Explain your responsibilities, an unfamiliar problem you worked through, and how you verified the result.

Also include one practical example of how you use AI in your technical work and how you check its output.

Please omit confidential client information.

Pay: $105,000.00-$155,000.00 per year

Benefits

- Work from home

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Vancouver, BC

📌 Senior Systems Administrator (Vancouver)
🏢 Silver Networks
📍 Vancouver