UNIC Athens, the University of Nicosia's academic and research base in Greece, combining internationally ranked teaching with state-of-the-art facilities, is seeking a Senior Campus Sensor & Systems Operations Engineer to join its team.

This role owns the on-campus hardware layer that feeds our data and AI platforms: antennas, receivers, environmental stations, cameras, radars, timing systems, and the on-prem servers that tie them together. You’re the person who makes sure “the machines are alive” and the data keeps flowing.

The work is hands-on, rooftop and rack-level, plus enough Linux and networking to keep a small sensor observatory running smoothly.

Responsibilities:

Keep a campus-scale sensor observatory online

Monitor health of diverse sensors: RF receivers, satellite downlinks, short-range radars, optical/IR cameras, acoustic arrays, seismic/structural, weather, and air-quality stations.

Diagnose issues across power, RF signal, network, and compute layers; coordinate timely fixes.

Maintain inventories, diagrams, and simple runbooks for each subsystem.

Operate on-prem compute and storage nodes

Maintain a small fleet of Linux servers dedicated to signal processing, media ingest, and sensor fusion.

Handle OS updates, basic security hardening, disk/CPU monitoring, and log rotation.

Work with central platform engineers to ensure data lands in the right queues/buckets/streams.

Manage power, networking, and timing for sensors

Oversee PoE switches, rooftop cabinets, UPS feeds, and basic environmental monitoring.

Ensure reliable fibre/copper connectivity between rooftop cabinets, comms rooms, and core network.

Operate and monitor GNSS-based timing / reference equipment used for precise time-stamping.

Support installation, maintenance, and calibration

Plan and execute sensor deployments and relocations (roof, mast, dish frame, façades) with facilities.

Coordinate periodic calibrations (e.g. weather, air quality, structural/ground sensors) with vendors and internal teams.

Enforce safe working practices for rooftop and equipment-room work.

Act as the bridge between campus and platform teams

Report status of on-campus systems and upcoming maintenance windows.

Help test new data feeds, firmware updates, and configuration changes before they go to production.

Provide clear feedback on physical constraints and operational realities back to architects and data/AI teams.

Additionally:

Daily / weekly operational checks on key systems, with clear escalation when something drifts or fails.

Set up and maintain monitoring dashboards and alerts (metrics, logs, basic traces) for sensors and compute.

Script routine tasks in Bash/Python (health checks, log scrapes, simple data sanity checks).

Coordinate with vendors and contractors for specialized repairs and installs.

Maintain accurate documentation (rack layouts, IP plans, cabling runs, rooftop layouts, change logs).

Qualifications:

Education:

• A BSc in Computer Engineering, or Electrical Engineering or related field.

Experience:

4+ years in a systems / field / instrumentation / NOC / SRE-style role, working with real hardware (not just cloud).

Required Skills:

Solid Linux experience (Ubuntu or similar): networking, system services, storage, logging.

Strong practical networking skills: VLANs, PoE switches, fibre vs copper, basic routing, VPNs.

Hands-on experience with at least some of:

Environmental or industrial sensors (weather, air quality, structural, seismic, etc.), or

RF / broadcast / telecom equipment, or

CCTV / video analytics / radar / acoustic sensing.

Comfortable reading wiring diagrams, labelling cables, and keeping tidy racks/cabinets.

Able to work safely on rooftops and with facilities teams; familiarity with basic electrical and lightning/surge safety.

Clear written documentation skills and enough English to collaborate with remote engineering teams.

Additional Skills:

Experience running or supporting a small observatory, lab, broadcast site, or similar multi-sensor facility.

Exposure to GNSS timing, NTP/PTP, or other time-synchronization systems.

Familiarity with Prometheus/Grafana or similar monitoring stacks.

Basic RF concepts (antennas, coax, gain/noise, filters) or environmental monitoring concepts (calibration, QA/QC).

Greek language skills and prior work on a university or research campus.

What success looks like:

Within a few weeks, you know every major sensor, cabinet, and server by name and location.

Within a few months, outages are rare, short, and well-understood, with clear runbooks and monitoring in place.

The data and AI teams treat the campus observatory as a reliable “black box” they can build on, because you keep it that way.