Senior SAS Viya Platform Engineer/SAS Administrator

Contract role until 31/03/27

Valid SC Clearance

Hybrid with on site work in either Leeds or Newcastle

Rate £540 pd Inside IR35

Role Overview

We are seeking an experienced SAS Viya Platform Engineer/SAS Administrator to deploy, administer, support, and operate SAS Viya 4 within an Azure-hosted environment.

The successful candidate will provide hands-on SAS platform expertise across installation, configuration, administration, security, monitoring, performance, upgrades, and production support. The role will work closely with DevOps Engineers, Cloud Architects, security teams, and analytical users to ensure the SAS Viya platform is secure, resilient, performant, and operationally supportable.

Key Responsibilities

• Deploy, configure, administer, maintain, and support S AS Viya 4 environments.
• Provide day-to-day administration and operational support for the SAS Viya platform.
• Manage SAS Viya services, configuration, users, groups, permissions, identities, and access controls.
• Support SAS Viya running within Kubernetes/containerised environments, including troubleshooting application and platform issues.
• Configure and maintain authentication and authorisation, integrating SAS Viya with enterprise identity and security services where required.
• Perform platform health checks, monitoring, incident investigation, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis.
• Support performance tuning, resilience, availability, capacity management, backup and recovery activities.
• Manage SAS Viya configuration changes, maintenance activities, patches, updates, and upgrades.
• Support integration of SAS Viya with underlying Azure services, storage, networking, security, and Kubernetes infrastructure.
• Work closely with DevOps Engineers on automated deployment processes, CI/CD pipelines, environment configuration, certificates, secrets, and infrastructure dependencies.
• Collaborate with data scientists, analysts, developers, architects, and technical support teams to resolve platform and application issues.
• Develop and maintain operational documentation, runbooks, support procedures, deployment records, and knowledge articles.
• Support transition of the platform from implementation/POC into a stable, supportable production service.

Essential Skills & Experience

Mandatory requirement:

• Demonstrable, recent hands-on experience deploying, administering and supporting SAS Viya 4.

Additional essential experience:

• Strong knowledge of SAS Viya 4 architecture, components, services, administration, configuration, and operational management.
• Strong SAS platform administration and troubleshooting experience.
• Practical understanding of Kubernetes and containerised application deployments.
• Experience working with Linux, including administration, troubleshooting, Shell Scripting, and log analysis.
• Good experience with Microsoft Azure, particularly cloud services, networking, security, storage, and platform operations.
• Experience configuring authentication, authorisation, RBAC, users, groups, permissions, certificates, and secrets.
• Experience implementing and supporting enterprise security controls around the SAS platform.
• Experience with platform monitoring, logging, performance tuning, resilience, backup/recovery, and production operations.
• Strong troubleshooting skills covering SAS Viya applications, Kubernetes, operating systems, connectivity, authentication, and platform configuration.
• Ability to work effectively with DevOps Engineers, Cloud Architects, security teams, application teams, and analytical/data science users.

Desirable Skills

• Experience running SAS Viya 4 on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
• Knowledge of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) administration and troubleshooting.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code, particularly Terraform.
• Experience with Azure DevOps and/or GitHub.
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment approaches.
• Experience with Kubernetes configuration/deployment technologies such as Kustomize or Helm.
• Experience with Azure Key Vault or similar enterprise secrets-management solutions.
• Understanding of cloud networking concepts including VNets, subnets, DNS, Private Endpoints, ingress, load balancing, and TLS certificates.
• Experience supporting platforms in secure, regulated, or UK government environments.