We recruit system administrators screened on uptime they owned: patching, backups, automation, and the quiet weeks that prove all three, permanent or contract.
Why STACK IT
Most agencies optimize for volume. We optimize for the one hire who’s right, vetted by people who understand the work.
We screen for how a candidate runs servers, identity, and backups, and how they behave at 2 a.m. when something breaks, not how many platforms they can list. No one reaches you without two of our recruiters signing off.
Fake profiles, proxy interviews, and AI-assisted answers are everywhere in tech hiring. We meet each candidate face-to-face on video and screen for AI patterns, so who you interview is who shows up.
A sysadmin learns every quirk of your environment, and that knowledge is the value. We align trajectory, growth, and total comp so your hire stays and the institutional memory grows.
Success-based and non-exclusive, no upfront fees, no retainers. We invoice on your hire’s first day, not before.
The payoff
Hiring well costs less than you think, and a strong hire changes far more than the work in front of them.
Systems that stay up and warn early.
Monitoring and maintenance catch trouble before users do.
Backups that actually restore.
Tested recovery makes an outage an inconvenience, not a disaster.
A current, hardened estate.
Disciplined patching closes the holes attackers look for.
Capacity ready when it’s needed.
Automation and good baselines make builds routine.
Identity that’s clean and auditable.
A tidy directory and access reviews keep it under control.
How we screen
We screen for how system administrators actually think. Every shortlist is judged against the same five criteria that predict whether someone delivers in your codebase.
Runs Windows and Linux estates confidently, from build to hardening to the unglamorous day-two maintenance that keeps them healthy.
Designs and tests recovery so a failure is survivable, and knows the restore works because they’ve actually done it.
Manages Active Directory or Entra, group policy, and access cleanly, with least-privilege as the default.
Comfortable with VMware, Hyper-V, or cloud, and scripts the repetitive work in PowerShell or Bash.
Keeps the estate current and hardened, and treats patching as routine rather than an emergency.
Proof it works
Discover what changed once the right hire joined our clients’ team.
A SaaS company had backups it had never actually restored. The admin we placed rebuilt the backup strategy and ran real recovery drills, cutting tested recovery time from an unknown four-plus hours to twenty minutes.
Brought a fintech’s server estate to full patch compliance with automated maintenance windows, clearing an audit finding.
Stabilized a healthcare provider’s aging server estate with monitoring and proactive maintenance, eliminating unplanned downtime for the quarter.
Real technical screening, a calibrated shortlist in days, and candidates vetted for fit, not just resumes. Let’s start your search.
Specializations
Whatever your team runs on, we screen for the people who do the work right.
Windows and Linux estates built, hardened, and maintained.
Hypervisors and clusters run efficiently and consolidated.
Directory, group policy, and access kept clean and least-privilege.
Systems kept current and locked down against known risk.
Tested restores and recovery plans for when something goes wrong.
Repetitive ops turned into scripts so the team scales without more headcount.
The cost of waiting
An empty seat doesn’t delay work, it redistributes it. The longer the search drags, the more it costs.
Every week a role stays open, the cost lands on the team you already have.
Speed isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between a gap and a setback.
Time to fill this role
How you hire
Two models, one standard of quality. Bring on the system administrators you need the way that fits your timeline and budget.
Permanent
Best when you’re building the team for the long term.
Contract
Best when you need delivery capacity now, without adding headcount.
Not sure which fits? Compare permanent vs. contract
FAQ
The questions teams usually ask before starting a search with us.
We test end-to-end ownership. We walk through environments a candidate has run across servers and workstations, probe how they handled patching, security, backups, and a real outage, and look at how they kept things stable without constant firefighting. The test is a secure, reliable environment, not a list of tools. The search runs through our IT infrastructure recruitment desk, alongside database administrator and IT support specialist roles.
A systems administrator owns servers, patching, and environment security end to end, while an IT support specialist focuses on endpoint and user troubleshooting. We screen for the right scope.
Migrations and build-outs can fit contract, while ongoing ownership of your environment is usually permanent. We advise based on the work.
You will typically see a first vetted candidate within 24 to 48 hours and a calibrated shortlist within about five business days.
Permanent hires are success-based: you pay only when someone starts, with no upfront fee, backed by our 90-day guarantee. Contract runs on a transparent hourly rate. We will walk you through the specifics on an intro call.
Look for the instinct to automate repetitive work away, and the discipline to do the unglamorous things, patching, backups, monitoring, before they are urgent. Ask for the 2 a.m. story: what broke, what they did, and what they changed so it stayed fixed. If the environment is mostly cloud, be honest about whether the role is becoming a cloud engineer position, because the strongest candidates will ask.
Sysadmin pay tracks scope: administrators running a single environment sit at the entry of the band shown on this page, systems administrators who own patching, backups, and automation across an estate land within it, and seniors running hybrid or cloud-heavy environments clear it, with Toronto paying toward the top. The market is splitting on automation: admins who script themselves out of repetitive work are moving up the band, and pay for purely manual operations is flat. Full bands by seniority and city are in our 2026 Canadian Tech Salary Guide.
Still have a question? Talk to a recruiter
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Every search keeps your hiring audit-ready in Ontario.
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Share the role and we’ll reply within one business day with a calibrated shortlist of three to five system administrators, screened for your stack and your team.
