Websphere Administrator

(Reference code: 00037H) Status: Full Time, Employee Location: Northbrook, IL Job Category: IT/Software Development Career Level:Experienced (Non-Manager) Education Level: Bachelor's Degree Job Description: The Allstate Corporation is the nation’s largest publicly held personal lines insurer. A Fortune 100 company, with $156 billion in assets, Allstate sells 13 major lines of insurance, including auto, property, life and commercial. Allstate also offers retirement and investment products and banking services. Allstate is widely known through the “You’re In Good Hands With Allstate®” slogan. Allstate was founded in 1931 and became a publicly traded company in 1993.For over 75 years, Allstate has been helping protect homes, cars and families across the country. As the nation’s largest publicly held personal lines insurance company, our success is built on an environment where the talents and contributions of every person are supported, respected and encouraged.   WEBSPHERE ADMINISTRATOR — Consultant Senior-Level Opportunity As a Websphere Administrator - Consultant, you will be responsible for designing, developing, maintaining, supporting and testing IT infrastructure to meet business needs. Primary responsibilities include: Managing the definition and communication of incidents, issue logging and resolution process. Creating, updating and reviewing configuration management plans and collaborating with architects to ensure application architecture compliance. Supporting root-cause analysis to provide application hardware/software health and resiliency on complex incidents. Managing daily usage and requests for changes to the environments and investigating new tools for environment improvement. Directing analysts’ activities to develop and maintain the production environment. Serving as lead for issue/problem resolution and assigning responsibility for problem resolution and workload balance. Directing recovery/roll-back and back-up efforts, defining vaulting plans, and defining business/information operating environment systems recovery. Developing/reviewing project plans and estimates for assigned environment management activities. Directing analyst(s) security work and serving as subject matter expert for security requirements.The successful candidate should exhibit the following skills and abilities: Computer Operations Procedures — Solid understanding of a broad range of computer/network operations concepts.  Systems Migration — Ability to move several complex systems from one environment to a state-of-the-art environment while redesigning elements to accommodate changes. Applications Operational Knowledge — Extensive knowledge and experience using the system with a clear understanding of operational and procedural aspects. Production Support Standards and Procedures — Demonstrates production support standards and procedures mastery which includes following standards and procedures without requiring support from others. Configuration Management — High-level of expertise using varied configuration tools in complex situations and achieving results without direct supervision. Change Management — Capable of achieving accurate results with challenging problems.  Involved in establishing structured methodology for responding to changeExperience required 4-6 years working with WebSphere and other IBM products. Ideally this candidate has worked on implementation using he SDLC using tranditional waterfall or agile approaches.  Computer proficiency Application servers and web servers — WebSphere, Websphere Portal, Jboss, WebLogic, Tomcat, I H SNecessary to be an expert with WebSphere because it's more heavily used than other application servers at Allstate and it is the application server standard for Allstate going forward. Exposure to IIS, Tomcat Application Development, Standards and Technologies — J2EE, CORBA, SOADeep understanding of middleware Java application frameworks, standards, technologies, and general interactions of J2EE application components and third party systems. Unix System AdministrationIt's critical that the person filling the middlware specialist role has strong Unix system administration skills.  These skills will be used for general troubleshooting, and shell programming,  Network InfrastructureGood understanding of networks and network infrastructure. Needs to know enough to do standard troubleshooting of application problems where the network may be a contributor to the problem and interact with the network team to get the information he/she needs to troubleshoot the application problem. Tools — Monitoring tools, Troubleshooting toolsExperience with monitoring tools like Wily Introscope, Tivoli performance viewer, Sitescope, WebSphere Application Monitor is necessary. Troubleshooting tools are also important. Experience with Thread Analyzer, WebSphere tracing tools, Tivoli performance viewer, garbage collection analyzing tools among others.  TroubleshootingThe ability to use the knowledge and experiences of the products and technologies listed above to troubleshoot problems is the key to this position.  Tuning — Application Server, JVM, OS, Web Server, Third Party ComponentsDeep experiences of Java applications, application servers, JVMs, operating systems, along with other components to tune application components while understanding the impacts of the tuning.  Application InfrastructureThe environment analyst should recommend hardware upgrades or additional hardware.  There may also be operating system configuration changes that would improve performance and throughput.  Allstate is widely recognized as one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For in IT”.  Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, ComputerWorld,  InformationWeek and Chicago magazines have also recognized us for our innovative and rewarding work environment.Allstate employs more than 4,000 information technology professionals that design and deliver innovative technology solutions for our businesses.  We offer extensive benefits including major medical, dental, vision, tuition reimbursement, 401k and pension plans. Good Work. Good Life. Good Hands. Learn more at Allstate.jobs