Data Systems Administrator, Plant Sciences

Data Systems Administrator, Plant Sciences

Primary Purpose: The Data Systems Administrator is responsible for designing, operationalizing, and maintaining the digital infrastructure that supports research and innovation within the Nutrien Centre for Sustainable and Digital Agriculture (NCSDA) at the University of Saskatchewan. This role ensures that the NCSDA’s computing, cloud, and data environments, including web-based dashboards and applications, are scalable, secure, and efficient. The position enables researchers, students, and collaborators to effectively leverage modern digital tools, operational data-driven pipelines and interactive interfaces to develop, deliver and operationalize agricultural and environmental research outputs.

Nature of Work: Reporting to the Director of the NCSDA, the Data Systems Administrator oversees the technical aspects of the NCSDA digital ecosystem as well as contributes to strategic planning for the NCSDA’s digital infrastructure and data innovation roadmap. They will also work collaboratively with the Digital Agriculture Research Data Manager, interdisciplinary faculty, technical staff, and USask Research Computing and IT services to ensure that data pipelines, analytical environments, storage systems, and user-facing applications operate reliably and securely. The Data Systems Administrator is also expected to provide technical guidance and mentorship to students and staff working with the NCSDA digital infrastructure through workshops or onboarding sessions. The work is primarily office-based at the NCSDA.

Typical Duties or Accountabilities:

System Architecture and Operations

• Design and maintain cloud and on-premises infrastructure to support large-scale research and AI workloads.
• Implement continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) workflows for reproducible research environments.
• Implement tools for monitoring, alerting, and observability frameworks (, Prometheus, Grafana, or ELK).
• Ensure scalability, security, reliability, and cost-efficiency across development, staging, and production environments.

Cloud and Compute Management

• Architect and manage workloads across cloud and hybrid compute platforms (, DRAC, AWS, GCP, and or USask clusters).
• Oversee containerized deployments (, Docker and Kubernetes) for modular, scalable service delivery.
• Ensure security, compliance, and resource optimization for compute-intensive research tasks.

Data Infrastructure and Integration

• Manage databases supporting agricultural, geospatial, and sensor datasets.
• Support data ingestion, federation, and access control across distributed systems.
• Work closely with the Digital Agriculture Data Manager to optimize database schemas, indexing, and query performance to ensure reliability and scalability.
• Collaborate with the Digital Agriculture Data Manager to align infrastructure with FAIR, OCAP, and open data principles.

Education: Bachelor’s degree or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Systems, or a related field with 3-5 years of experience.

Experience:

• Proven experience managing CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure automation (, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI).
• Hands-on experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes) and cloud computing platforms (, AWS, GCP, or OpenStack).
• Strong foundation in database management (, SQL, PostgreSQL, or similar) and data integration.
• Experience deploying AI/ML frameworks is an asset.

Skills:

• Strong technical architecture, automation, and troubleshooting skills.
• Ability to design scalable, secure, and maintainable digital environments.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills with both technical and non-technical users.
• Commitment to open, transparent, and sustainable digital infrastructure practices.
• Adaptability and problem-solving skills within research environments.