Senior Service Engineer

Job Description - L2 Storage Administrator

Role Summary

The L2 Storage Administrator is responsible for day-to-day operations, monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimization of enterprise storage and backup infrastructure, ensuring high availability, data protection, and SLA compliance across on-prem and cloud environments.

Key Responsibilities

1. Operations & Monitoring

• Perform daily monitoring of storage and backup jobs, ensuring successful completion and SLA adherence
• Track storage utilization, capacity, and performance metrics
• Generate operational reports on backup success rates, failures, and storage usage

2. Incident & Problem Management

• Troubleshoot storage, SAN/NAS, and backup failures and restore services within SLA
• Perform root cause analysis (RCA) for recurring issues
• Handle Major Incident (MI) calls and escalations (common L2 ownership - based on enterprise practice)

3. Backup & Recovery Management

• Administer backup solutions (e.g., Cohesity, IBM Spectrum Protect, Azure Backup)
• Execute backup, restore, and recovery requests
• Ensure data integrity, retention policies, and recoverability testing are maintained

4. Storage Administration

• Manage storage arrays, volumes, LUNs, and storage pools
• Perform capacity planning and allocation
• Support SAN/NAS provisioning and migrations

5. Configuration & Change Management

• Implement configuration changes, patching, and upgrades
• Perform impact analysis and risk assessment before changes
• Follow ITIL processes for Change & Release management

6. Automation & Optimization (Important for your org)

• Execute and maintain automation scripts (Ansible, PowerShell, etc.)
• Support optimization initiatives like deduplication, compression, encryption
• Reduce manual effort (TOIL) through automation

7. Security & Compliance

• Enforce access control, encryption, and security policies
• Ensure systems comply with audit requirements (SOC2, HIPAA-like environments)
• Participate in backup immutability and ransomware protection initiatives

8. Documentation & Process Adherence

• Maintain SOPs, knowledge articles, and environment documentation
• Update runbooks for incident resolution and operational processes

Required Skills

Technical Skills

• Storage platforms: Dell EMC (Unity, PowerStore, PowerMax), NetApp, Pure, IBM
• Backup tools: Cohesity, IBM Spectrum Protect, Azure Backup
• SAN technologies: Fibre Channel, iSCSI
• OS knowledge: Windows, Linux
• Cloud: Azure storage & backup services
• Scripting: PowerShell, Python, or Ansible (preferred)

Functional Skills

• Incident & Problem Management (ITIL)
• Strong troubleshooting & analytical skills
• Ability to handle on-call rotations and escalations (commonly expected for L2 roles)
• Communication skills for cross-team coordination

KPIs / Success Metrics

• Backup success rate (%)
• SLA adherence for incidents & requests
• MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve)
• Storage capacity utilization efficiency
• Compliance & audit readiness

Role Positioning (L2 vs L1/L3)

Nice-to-Have (Aligned to your team strategy)

• Experience in Automation-first operations / AI monitoring
• Exposure to backup immutability / cyber recovery
• Knowledge of enterprise dashboards (Power BI, telemetry tools)