SAS Administrator

    The Allstate Corporation (NYSE: ALL) is the nation's largest publicly held personal lines insurer. Widely known through the "You're In Good Hands With Allstate?" slogan, Allstate helps individuals in approximately 17 million households protect what they have today and better prepare for tomorrow through approximately 14,100 exclusive agencies and financial professionals in the U.S. and Canada. Customers can access Allstate products and services such as auto insurance and homeowners insurance through Allstate agencies, or in select states at allstate.com and 1-800 Allstate?.

 

The position is located in Northbrook, IL

 

The purpose of the department is providing research services to enable the enterprise in statistical modeling and facilitates the transformation of data into predictive information/knowledge; maintain a center of excellence (COE) for the SAS in this environment; and provide consulting services to the organization. The purpose of the SAS Advisory team within the Research Enablement group is to provide flexible and efficient environment and technology support to the business in its advanced analytics work. 



 

The scope of this job is a unique opportunity as a member of the Research Enablement team responsible for flexible and efficient environment and technology support to the business in its advanced modeling work. The scope of this job is to manage the shared SAS environment provided to the research community and support the team in becoming a Center Of Excellence for SAS at Allstate Insurance Co. Role will assist in tool use when the needs of the client involves activities that only a SAS expert can solve. Provide in depth knowledge of SAS products/ tools and its capabilities.

 

The individual will be responsible for

 

1. Responsible for SAS tool administration.  Recommends environment/configuration enhancements that will improve SAS performance.  Coordinates configuration/installation and general troubleshooting of updates, patch application and upgrades of SAS software with users.  Implements hardware and software testing. Recognizes and troubleshoots problems with server and SAS software.

2. Creating and managing the setup of the SAS use guidelines as well as overseeing the implementation of the standards within the department as well as the user community.

3. Responsible for environment management. Works with users to automate SAS processes including clean up, application level backup of SAS objects after every update, SAS execution schedules and application recovery after production update failure (including back out process). Resource monitoring, management and reporting of environment. Liaison with Infrastructure Services & SAS to ensure availability of environment.  Conducts impact analysis for new large SAS routines within the environment.

4. Educate users on SAS tools and best practices. Assist in organizing SAS and related objects within the advanced analytics and research environment, When needed, help to coordinate updates to programs used by multiple teams within the environment. Provides technical consulting on complex projects.  Assist with SAS coding, testing, debugging, and documentation for large projects and new users.  May train end users on software and develop training manuals/programs.

 

 

 

The skills required are:

 

1. Advanced - SAS statistical package/products and familiarity analytic techniques and processes. Ability to support complex analytical modeling and experience in developing prototypes.

2. Advanced - Strong interpersonal and client management skills

3. Advanced - Self motivation and ability to work with little supervision

4. Intermediate - Project Management Skills

5. Intermediate - UNIX experience, with a working knowledge of commands, editors and shell scripting.

 

Experience Required:

1. Effective communication skills, desire to partner with business and understand how tools will be used in Allstate's analytic environment. Ability to clearly communicate in an accessible manner technical solutions to the business. 

2. Individual should have a strong technical track record with at least 6+ years of combined technical management and business experience with SAS. 

3. Candidate should be a self-starter and work well with little guidance from management. Additionally, candidate should have experience in collaborating and influencing cross-functional project teams. 

4. Candidate should have significant experience in driving projects through their full systems development lifecycle. 

5. The candidate must be quick to adapt to a changing requests and priorities and be able to quickly absorb and understand the implications of the change and how it impacts cost and timeline estimation as well as overall project execution. 

6. The candidate must show innovative thinking skills to provide multiple options in formulating customer solutions. 

7. Candidate should have a good understanding of users requirements and needs. They need to be able to speak in both business and technical language. 

8. Candidate must be customer service/client relationship focused and have proven experience working in a fast paced and results oriented environment. 

9. The candidate must have excellent communication and interpersonal skills. 

 

Computer Proficiency:

Unix, Mainframe, Familiarity with multiple SAS products (BASE, GRAPH, STAT, EM, IML, ETS (EG on PC),  Access for Oracle, Connect), SPSS, Oracle, XML, PERL, Microsoft Office Suite,

 

Allstate offers extensive benefits, including medical, vision, dental, profit sharing, pension, group life, paid time off, tuition reimbursement, short and long-term disability, flexible spending account, adoption reimbursement, and group legal care. If you are interested in this position, please click on the following link: