Director, IT Infrastructure and Operations

The Director, IT Infrastructure and Operations role encompasses planning, execution, and administration of cutting-edge IT infrastructure and operational processes, across a mix of on premise, co-located and Microsoft Azure cloud services. These initiatives are the foundation of our business - and you'll forge a path by establishing, monitoring, and steering the direction, budget, plans, and necessary actions for migration of the company’s IT infrastructure to the cloud to deliver a dependable, resilient, dynamically scalable, secure, and high-performing infrastructure/platform, whether as a service or as code, to empower the information systems and data teams.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Strategy & Leadership

• Be a culture shaper and builder, modelling company values. Be adaptive and open, with a growth mindset. Foster new ideas and drive the continual learning and professional competency of self and team.
• Own the outcome. Collaboratively plan and execute as one with leadership peers, business, and operating stakeholders to establish direction, solution requirements, roadmaps (priority, timing) and funding requirements, aligned with Company strategic plans and financial position.
• Ensure information technology alignment with organizational objectives.
• Maintain technical depth and breadth to establish technical direction and best practice, credibly leading teams on platforms, practices, processes and enterprise-grade approaches and patterns.
• Adept at developing best practices and talent, resulting in an enviable IT capability.
• Drive the cultural and practice changes necessary to enable modern agile and DevSecOps practices, including automation, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, and continuous integration capabilities.
• Establish and maintain a cost-effective, high-quality stable of strategic external partners who augment internal team members as needed for cost effectiveness, variable demand or skill depth.

Infrastructure and Operations

• Design, plan and implement a multi-tenant (country) highly available, performant, fluidly scalable, secure and cost-effective Azure infrastructure and operations capability to enable best-in-class data and information system and data products and services.
• Drive the cultural and practice changes necessary to enable SecDevOps practices.
• Develop and maintain a configuration change management solution and lead IT Change Management program to ensure efficient and reliable outcomes.
• Implement ITIL-based IT service management processes and tools.
• Develop and manage proactive information technology monitoring capabilities (capacity, performance, forecasting, etc) to ensure exceptional reliability and performance across all technology layers.
• Relentlessly pursue continuous improvement, automation and continuous integration, continuous deployment methodologies to enable infrastructure as code capabilities to the data and application teams.
• Manage and monitor resources consumption, develop and adhere to budgets and optimize the cost, value and specification of cloud resources.
• Establish a concise set of metrics / KPIs to monitor and report on operations cost and performance. Implement accountability reporting to align cost drivers with organizational management responsibility.
• Lead in development, and implementation of IT infrastructure that exceeds stability, scalability, availability, and latency requirements for infrastructure and data / information systems.

Governance, Risk Management, Privacy and Security

• Formulate comprehensive strategies, outline roadmaps, and execute daily operations to proactively safeguard the company’s data, systems, and intellectual property assets, evolving with the business needs, and including robust IT governance frameworks (e.g. NIST, ISO, Cobit), policies, procedures and solutions to facilitate efficient compliance with emerging personal privacy rules and regulations.
• Analyzes trends, news, and developments in threat and compliance environment relative to organizational risk. Advises and coordinates responses with management, developing and executing written plans for compliance and mitigation of risk.
• Understand potential threats, vulnerabilities, and control techniques and solicit security, risk and compliance self-assessments and periodic, independent third-party assessments and audits.
• Ensures a comprehensive business continuity and incident recovery capability, including compute, storage, integration, network, communications, and related resources.
• Collaborate with IT peers and business unit leadership to develop and periodically exercise (tabletop exercises and actual testing) business continuity and incident response plans.
• Investigate and remediate security breaches in collaboration with Human Resources and Legal team members, employing external expertise and capacity as needed.
• Develop and maintain a security and risk awareness and training program, working with the business units to facilitate risk assessment and risk management processes and to raise awareness of security and risk management concerns.