IT Systems Administrator

About Us

At Kea Aerospace, we're on a mission to create insights from the stratosphere that will improve life on our planet. We're developing the Kea Atmos, a solar-powered, remotely piloted aircraft designed to fly continuously in the stratosphere for months at a time. Operating at around 60,000 feet, the Atmos will deliver high-resolution aerial imagery for maritime surveillance, environmental monitoring and disaster management. We're a small R&D team in Christchurch, and you'll own the systems our design and flight test work depends on.

What You'll Do

Our fully operational, self-managed infrastructure spans servers, networking, virtualisation hosts and engineering workstations. You will take day-to-day ownership of the IT infrastructure, which runs various engineering workloads such as simulations, processing of large datasets, test environments and the use of PLM systems. Working in this environment means maintenance windows have to fit around day-to-day engineering and our flight test schedule.

The role reports to our Avionics Lead. You will start with a handover, learning the systems from the engineers who built them, and take over from there. You will continue working closely with engineering after that, as the infrastructure exists to support aircraft design and flight testing.

Administer our servers, network equipment and virtualisation platforms, and patch, update and harden them on a regular cycle

Carry out upgrades and configuration changes without interrupting engineering work or flight test campaigns

Manage laptops and workstations across their working life: purchase, build, domain join, software, handover, retirement

Run identity and access in our local Active Directory: onboarding, offboarding, group policy, permissions, and access to design IP and flight data

Support the team day to day when something breaks or someone needs access, hardware or IT advice

Monitor performance, availability and security, and respond to incidents and outages

Own backup and disaster recovery, including testing of backups and recovery processes

Maintain our IT policies and security controls: password and key rotation, endpoint protection, patch compliance, application allow-listing

Keep documentation current for infrastructure, configurations, credential handling and disaster recovery

Identify where our infrastructure should improve, propose the approach, and take it through to delivery

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years in a hands-on infrastructure role, and experience being the person responsible rather than part of a larger team
• Windows Server and Active Directory, including group policy
• Linux server administration, primarily RHEL-style
• Virtualisation: Proxmox / KVM
• Networking: VLANs, routing, firewall configuration and VPNs, ideally using RouterOS and Ubiquiti
• Network-attached storage holding sensitive data
• Backup systems and disaster recovery planning
• What Will Give You a Head Start

PowerShell and Bash scripting

Containerisation with Docker

Entra ID or Microsoft 365 administration, particularly hybrid or federated setups

Additional Requirements

We're open to this role being full-time or part-time. If you'd prefer part-time, let us know in your application how many days a week would suit you. This role requires you to be onsite at our Christchurch facility.

This role holds privileged access to our core systems, engineering IP and flight data. Any offer will be conditional on satisfactory reference and background checks, and the legal right to work in New Zealand.

Some of our future work may require New Zealand Government security clearances. We'll talk through what this could mean for the role during the interview process.