Systems Engineer
We are looking for a Systems Engineer who is passionate about understanding why things are slow and how to make them faster. As part of our newly formed Citrix Customer Experience team, you will work alongside Citrix experts and a driven manager to systematically analyze, troubleshoot, and improve Citrix logon times and application performance for our healthcare clients. This is a hands-on engineering role with a proactive mandate. You will not be sitting waiting for tickets to come in — you will be proactively diving into data, dashboards, and traces to find the problems before customers feel them and fixing them in a way that scales across our entire customer base.
Key Responsibilities
- Proactive Performance Monitoring & Analysis
- Monitor Citrix logon performance dashboards daily across your assigned customer portfolio, proactively identifying anomalies, outliers, and trends
- Analyze logon time data broken down by phase — HDX, GPO processing, Profile Load, Authentication, Interactive Session — to pinpoint where time is being lost
- Investigate variation between customers, between machines within a customer, and between users on the same machine to identify systemic and one-off issues
- Correlate logon data with network performance, subnet-level analysis, server resource utilization, and event logs to build a full picture of contributing factors
- Troubleshooting & Remediation
- Execute structured diagnostic workflows to investigate slow Citrix logon issues, leveraging tools including Citrix Director, Wireshark, Azure Log Analytics, event viewer (errors, mapped drive failures), and Power BI dashboards
- Investigate and remediate GPO-related logon issues — including misconfigurations, overlapping policies, missing best-practice settings, and legacy GPO drift across customer environments
- Work through known categories of logon delay including HDX session creation (SCCD), Name Resolution (NRWD), Profile Load (PCVD), Group Policy processing (GPVD), and Drive Mapping (DMVD)
- Identify and apply GPO best practices across VDA environments — including proxy settings, auto-discovery (WPAD), Citrix VDA configuration settings, and Windows component settings
- Validate that Citrix Workspace App (or Receiver) versions are current and consistent; identify customers with outdated receiver versions contributing to session performance issues
- Assist in the investigation of Double Hop scenarios and their impact on HDX connection times and CPU overhead on VDAs
- Standardization & Knowledge Management
- Audit customer environments against the established GPO best practice library and Citrix policy standards, documenting gaps and driving remediation
- Document every finding, root cause, and resolution clearly in a shared knowledge base (ServiceNow or equivalent) so that lessons from one customer can be applied to all
- Contribute to the development and refinement of the team's diagnostic playbook, adding new patterns, tools, and techniques as they are discovered
- Participate in regular team knowledge-sharing sessions and training surges to build proficiency across all monitoring and diagnostic tools
- Collaboration & Communication
- Work closely with Expert Systems Engineers and the team manager to escalate complex issues, share findings, and collectively develop solutions
- Partner with Citrix and Windows team members to coordinate remediation actions and ensure changes are implemented correctly and validated
- Communicate clearly with customers and internal stakeholders about identified issues, planned remediations, and expected outcomes
- Contribute to the tracking and reporting of team progress, improvement metrics, and customer impact
Required Qualifications
- 3+ years of hands-on experience with Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (XenApp/XenDesktop) administration and troubleshooting
- 3+ years of Windows Server administration experience, including Group Policy (GPO) creation, management, and troubleshooting in enterprise Active Directory environments
- Understanding of the Citrix logon process and its key phases — including session startup, HDX, authentication, GPO processing, profile loading, and interactive session initialization
- Familiarity with Citrix logon metrics — such as SSCD, SCCD, NRWD, GPVD, PCVD, DMVD — and what they indicate about session performance
- Experience using Citrix Director for session monitoring, troubleshooting, and logon phase analysis
- Ability to read and interpret event logs and identify error patterns relevant to logon performance (e.g., mapped drive failures, GPO processing errors)
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a methodical approach to troubleshooting and a habit of documenting findings
- Ability to work independently on assigned customers/tasks while contributing actively to team-level goals and knowledge sharing
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with Power BI or Logic Monitor for performance monitoring and trend analysis
- Familiarity with FSLogix or other profile management solutions (e.g., Citrix Profile Management)
- Working knowledge of Azure cloud environments and Azure Log Analytics
- Experience with Wireshark or other packet capture tools for network-layer troubleshooting
- Exposure to StoreFront configuration and Workspace App architecture
- Understanding of proxy settings, WPAD/auto-proxy detection, and their impact on Citrix session behavior
- Basic scripting skills in PowerShell to automate data collection or analysis tasks
- Experience working with healthcare IT clients or in a managed services environment
- Citrix certification (CCA-V or working toward CCE-V) is a plus
What Success Looks Like
Within 30 days, you are monitoring your assigned customer dashboards daily, have completed onboarding training on the team's toolset (Citrix Director, Power BI, Logic Monitor, Azure Log Analytics), and have completed your first GPO audit on an assigned customer. Within 90 days, you have independently identified and driven the resolution of at least one meaningful logon performance improvement and contributed findings to the team knowledge base.
Harris provides mission critical software solutions for the Public Sector, Healthcare, Utilities and Private Sector verticals throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Working for Harris is the perfect opportunity to fulfill your professional goals as well as achieve your personal dreams! Our employees enjoy a casual work environment that offers comfort while providing superior service to our customers. We offer a comprehensive benefit package as well as other additional "Perks"! We empower our employees to make a difference. We have an award winning culture. We offer opportunity to learn. We are financially strong and we are owned by the largest software company in Canada (CSI). We have fun!