Network Administrater

About the Company

Country Supplier is the home of two familiar brands: CAL Ranch Stores in Idaho, Utah, Nevada and Arizona, and Coastal Farm and Ranch in Washington and Oregon. Operating 55 stores combined, Country Supplier offers retail agriculture, sporting goods, and more to our communities, driven by a mission statement that includes the directive to provide legendary customer service to their customers. The outlook is positive, and there is a vision of consistent growth over the next five years.

About the Team

Expanding on that mission statement, our IT Department focuses on creating proactive, preventative solutions, and positive relationships with our customers. By being proactive, the team can address technical issues before they become incidents, reducing customer frustration. Preventative measures ensure that we are helping the company and our customers to achieve its goals, and positive relationships increase trust and collaborative efforts, which is especially important when providing remote support. Our team is growing both in scale, and in skill to support the company’s growth.

Job Description

The Network Admin II will be building proficiency in designing, maintaining, and troubleshooting LAN and WAN networks that are resilient and robust. An understanding of LAN infrastructure limitations and requirements for cabling and wireless specifications is required. The Network Admin II will be the primary technical contact with the IT Operations team for troubleshooting networking issues, escalating support, and coordinating project work.

Self-starting and motivation are qualities we are looking for in our Network Admin II. They will work with the Network Admin III to create and update network diagrams for each site as well as the corporate network and identifying opportunities to improve the customer experience on our network. They will be able to self-direct maintenance and standard operating practices to maintain active networks at all store locations remotely.

An understanding of WAN networking and how the various WAN technologies will interact with our LAN at each site is expected. The Network Admin II will be the secondary technical contact when working with ISP and Telecom vendors to ensure that site networks are robust, secure, and fully functional. They will also train the IT Operations team on networking standards and troubleshooting to expand and reinforce our support to the stores.

The Network Admin II will work with the Network team to identify, prepare and present projects for improving the network stability, redundancy and integrity, as well as take ownership of the network aspects of projects being led by IT and Business leaders. They will be the escalation contact for our Helpdesk Specialists regarding all network infrastructure issues that are reported. The Network Admin II will be responsible for resolving network related tickets assigned to them, whether through direct work, or managing contacts with the appropriate vendors, and collaboration with other team members to resolve the issue, and clearly documenting the work done in the ticket system.

The Network Admin II will also assist in implementing, maintaining, and reviewing network security at each point in the network. They will review access control lists and firewall policies to ensure that network security meets the standards of PCI compliance and add or remove policies as needed. Other responsibilities will include restricting switchport access to acceptable devices, properly segmenting networks by security levels, and maintaining a secure Wi-Fi environment.

Communication is crucial to our IT Team. The Network Admin II will be engaged in creating, updating, and reviewing Knowledge Base Articles (KBA). This includes reviewing KBA submitted by other team members for clarity and relevance and creating KBA for both internal IT Department use and customer use for simple troubleshooting. When interacting with customers, the Network Administrator Lead will be professional and respectful, able to translate complicated technical jargon into terms non-IT professionals will understand.

Position Qualifications

• Professional and courteous communication skills.
  • Through email, chat, ticket, phone, and in person.
• Ability to respond calmly during customer contact.
  • Our customers are experiencing technical difficulty, often in front of their own customers. This can cause additional stress for those calling us.
• 2 years higher education in IT/Network Administration Field
  • AND/OR
• 3 years professional experience in Network Administrator Role
• Aptitude for and experience leading small project-based teams.
• Competence in Network Infrastructure technology practices and terminologies such as:
  • OSI Model, VPN tunnels, MPLS networks, wireless technologies, network infrastructure standards and nomenclature, WLAN controllers, managed switch gear, network security standards, VLAN creation, DHCP and DNS configuration, fiber/copper cabling and transceivers, packet inspection, NGFW technologies such as TLS inspection and DPI, SSL certificates and PKI, network access control technologies such as 802.1X, hypervisor virtual switching, automation of repetitive tasks via Powershell or other scripting languages, and diagramming.
• Ability to travel.
• Ability to translate technical jargon into language understood by the customer.
• Ability to work under the direction of Network Admin and IT leadership.
• CompTIA Network and/or similar certification/education.