I'm mostly posting this in case anyone else spent an hour trying to figure out where the admin link was. It's in the bottom left, which is somewhat unique to websites and (for me) was obscured.
I'm sure the UX team debated the placement, but I feel like you might be over-thinking this. Admin/settings links always seem to in the upper right, it doesn't really block anything (does the search bar need to be that big?). Anyway, I'm a data scientist, so maybe I'm the idiot here, but just in case there are more like me - look left and down.