System Administration Manager
This role is an office position based either in Louisville, KY.
What the Role Is
The System Administration Manager leads the team responsible for supporting the company’s ERP platform, connected systems, and other enterprise applications and technology platforms as needed. This role provides day-to-day leadership for system administration, service management, environment and server management, application maintenance, licensing, and operational support to ensure business-critical technology remains stable, secure, reliable, and well managed.
This highly collaborative role partners with technical teams, business stakeholders, and vendors to maintain system health, coordinate support activities, manage technology investments, and drive operational improvements. The Manager will bring strong experience managing enterprise systems and technical teams, with the ability to balance daily operational needs with longer-term platform strategy, lifecycle planning, and continuous improvement.
How You Will Spend Your Time?
Team Leadership & Support
- Lead, coach, and develop the system administration team responsible for enterprise platforms, applications, and connected systems.
- Set priorities, clarify responsibilities, manage workload, and ensure operational commitments are completed in a timely and organized manner.
- Build a culture of accountability, service, collaboration, technical ownership, and continuous improvement.
- Support resource planning, escalation management, performance management, and team development.
- Ensure appropriate support coverage and knowledge sharing across critical systems.
Systems & Application Management
- Oversee the administration and operational support of the company’s ERP platform, connected systems, and other enterprise applications and platforms assigned to the team.
- Ensure systems are available, stable, secure, and performing effectively across production and non-production environments.
- Manage day-to-day system maintenance, including application administration, configuration, patching, upgrades, monitoring, access, troubleshooting, and preventative maintenance.
- Establish clear ownership and support expectations for systems within the team’s portfolio.
- Partner with infrastructure, database, security, development, and application teams to maintain overall system health and resolve complex technical issues.
Service Management & Operational Governance
- Lead incident, request, problem, and change management processes for supported systems.
- Establish and maintain operational standards, support procedures, documentation, and escalation paths.
- Monitor recurring issues, coordinate root cause analysis, and drive sustainable solutions rather than repeated short-term fixes.
- Establish and monitor service levels and operational performance measures for critical systems.
- Drive continuous improvement opportunities that increase reliability, simplify administration, automate manual activities, and improve the overall support experience.
Environment & Server Management
- Oversee environment planning and support across development, test, training, and production environments.
- Coordinate server administration, environment refreshes, system maintenance, patching, upgrades, and related operational activities.
- Ensure environments remain consistent, appropriately secured, and ready to support development, testing, releases, training, and business operations.
- Coordinate planned outages and maintenance windows while minimizing business disruption.
- Partner with infrastructure, database, security, and other technical teams to maintain system performance, capacity, availability, backup, recovery, and appropriate access controls.
Application Integration & Technical Coordination
- Oversee operational support for applications, interfaces, APIs, middleware, and other technologies connecting enterprise systems.
- Coordinate troubleshooting of integrations, scheduled processes, data movement, and cross-platform issues.
- Maintain awareness of technical dependencies across applications, infrastructure, databases, and external services.
- Ensure operational readiness for system changes, releases, upgrades, and new integrations.
- Coordinate technical teams and vendors during complex incidents or changes involving multiple systems.
Budget, Licensing & Vendor Management
- Manage the operating budget for systems, applications, services, and vendors within the team’s area of responsibility.
- Own or coordinate software licensing, subscription management, renewals, maintenance agreements, and support contracts.
- Monitor license utilization and identify opportunities to optimize costs while maintaining appropriate business capabilities and support coverage.
- Support annual budget planning and forecasting for software, infrastructure, professional services, upgrades, and other technology investments.
- Manage vendor relationships and hold partners accountable for service levels, deliverables, issue resolution, and contractual commitments.
- Identify upcoming lifecycle, capacity, licensing, and maintenance needs and proactively incorporate them into technology and budget planning.
Communication & Stakeholder Management
- Serve as a primary operational contact for systems and applications supported by the team.
- Communicate clearly with business leaders, technical teams, and vendors regarding system health, risks, incidents, priorities, and planned changes.
- Provide timely status updates, escalations, recommendations, and operational reporting.
- Coordinate communication and planning for system changes, maintenance, outages, releases, and critical events.
- Build strong partnerships across Technology and business functions to understand service expectations and evolving system needs.
Who You Are…