Ab Initio Administrator

Recruiter: Golden Rule

Job Ref: GDR03839

Date posted: Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Location: Johannesburg, South Africa

Salary: Negotiable

SUMMARY: Role Summary: We are looking for a Senior Ab Initio Administrator with 8+ years of experience to manage the administration, optimization, and governance of enterprise Ab Initio environments. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in EME administration, platform upgrades, performance tuning, and DR strategy, along wi...

POSITION INFO: Role Summary: We are looking for a Senior Ab Initio Administrator with 8+ years of experience to manage the administration, optimization, and governance of enterprise Ab Initio environments. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in EME administration, platform upgrades, performance tuning, and DR strategy, along with the ability to mentor junior administrators and work directly with architecture and delivery teams on platform strategy. Â Key Responsibilities: Installation and upgrades: Install, configure, and upgrade the entire suite of Ab Initio products - Co>Operating System, Technical Repository (EME) and web applications like Authorization Gateway, Control>Center, Metadata Hub, Query>It and Express>It EME Administration: User access control, code promotion, branching, periodic backup, locking, and version control. Environment provisioning: Create, configure, manage, and isolate separate environments that support all stages of SDLC - DEV, QA Production - in both EME and sandboxes. Resource management: Monitor and optimise server resources like CPU, Memory, and Disk space to ensure Ab Initio environment runs efficiently. Performance Tuning and troubleshooting: Diagnose and resolve configuration issues, platform failures, job failures, access issues for users, and troubleshooting issues with web applications. Security, Compliance and Governance: Implement user authentication and authorization policies by integrating with LDAP/Active Directory, perform periodic Disaster recovery tests Ensuring compliance with data security standards and securing connectivity to data sources, install SSL certificates for all Ab Initio applications. Automation and DevOps: Develop and maintain shell scripts to automate routine administrative tasks like file system cleanup, environment health checks, periodic backup/recovery processes, automate code promotion/migration process to higher environments. Capacity Forecasting: Track system utilization stats and trends for CPU, memory and disk I/O, network and provide forecast of the infrastructure needs. Manage critical production incidents, job failures, driving root cause analysis and long-term fixes. Collaborate with enterprise architects, data engineering leads, and infrastructure/security teams to align Ab Initio platform strategy with broader data platform modernisation initiatives (e.g., cloud migration). Manage vendor relationships with Ab Initio support for critical issues/assistance. 8+ years of hands-on experience in Ab Initio administration, including Co>Operating System, GDE, EME, Control Center, and Conduct>It. Proven experience managing large-scale, high-volume production Ab Initio environments in a regulated or enterprise setting (banking/financial services preferred). Deep expertise in Enterprise metadata environment, versioning, branching, and multi-environment promotion strategies. Strong background in Unix/Linux system administration and shell scripting (Bash) for automation, monitoring, and self-healing scripts. Extensive experience with job scheduling tools (Control-M, or equivalent) and enterprise monitoring/alerting integration. Strong understanding of database platforms (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Postgres) and connectivity/performance tuning with Ab Initio. Demonstrated experience in disaster recovery planning and execution, including failover testing. Solid understanding of networking, security, LDAP/AD, and Kerberos authentication in enterprise environments. Experience with cloud platforms (AWS/Azure). Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices as applied to ETL platform deployments.