System Administrator III

About the Role

The Systems Administrator interprets operational needs and resolves or escalates technical issues in a timely manner. Acting as a lead technical expert, the role involves maintaining, upgrading, and supporting mission-critical applications and hardware solutions. Daily responsibilities include monitoring system integrity, verifying availability of hardware and networks, and ensuring successful completion of scheduled jobs such as backups, restores, and patches. The administrator collaborates with IT teams and vendors to optimise performance, supports field services with installations, and provides technical guidance for hardware/software deployments. The role also ensures compliance with change management and security policies, conducts risk assessments, and mentor’s junior staff. Ultimately, the Systems Administrator safeguards system stability and enables efficient store operations across the Shoprite Group.

What you'll do:

Hardware Management (Hardware & Peripherals)

• Maintain approved hardware standards, lifecycle plans, and technology roadmaps for supported retail hardware platforms.
• Ensure all new hardware and peripheral technologies are validated, certified, and operationally fit before deployment into production environments.
• Continuously improve hardware availability and reliability through proactive monitoring, trend analysis, root cause investigation, and preventative action implementation.
• Drive hardware standardisation initiatives to reduce support complexity, operational risk, and total cost of ownership.
• Ensure store imaging, deployment, and hardware refresh activities achieve agreed quality, compliance, and success targets.
• Develop and maintain installation standards, technical documentation, and operational guides to enable consistent deployment and support practices.
• Improve operational support capability through knowledge transfer, technical coaching, and training of internal support teams and external service providers.
• Ensure recurring hardware failures are identified, investigated, and permanently resolved through structured problem management practices.
• Collaborate with vendors and internal stakeholders to evaluate emerging technologies and continuously improve the retail hardware estate.

Technology Validation & Certification

• Execute structured validation and certification programmes for retail hardware platforms, peripherals, operating system images, and store solutions.
• Validate compatibility of new software releases, hardware revisions, security updates, and infrastructure changes prior to production deployment.
• Identify operational risks and defects before implementation through controlled testing and quality assurance processes.
• Ensure testing outcomes, findings, and recommendations are documented and communicated to relevant stakeholders.
• Maintain testing schedules that support platform currency, business continuity, and operational readiness.

Scale Management Administration & Support

• Maintain the integrity, accuracy, and availability of scale and MFS master data across all supported stores.
• Ensure timely and successful synchronization of scale data, pricing information, product updates, and operational configurations.
• Monitor platform health and proactively address risks impacting scale availability, performance, or data integrity.
• Investigate and resolve recurring scale-related incidents through structured problem management and preventative controls.
• Ensure scale-related batch processing activities are completed successfully and corrective actions are implemented when failures occur.
• Maintain monitoring, alerting, and reporting capabilities to enable proactive management of scale platforms and supporting infrastructure.
• Support store implementations, upgrades, migrations, and technology refresh initiatives for scale environments.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders, vendors, infrastructure teams, network services, security teams, architects, and platform owners to ensure scale solutions remain aligned with operational and architectural standards.
• Develop and maintain operational procedures, recovery processes, and technical documentation supporting the scale estate.
• Improve platform stability, supportability, and operational efficiency through continuous service improvement initiatives.