Associate Director, Infrastructure Operations

How will this role impact First Command?

The Associate Director (AD) of Infrastructure Operations is responsible for supporting the strategic direction, planning, and execution of enterprise-wide IT infrastructure. This role leads the infrastructure teams to ensure the reliability, scalability, and security of systems and services, and collaboration across departments to meet organizational goals.

This role primarily acts as a servant leader driving business priorities into Infrastructure execution. They uphold the established best practices and processes defined by the Infrastructure operational processes. Additionally, this role requires strong communication skills and facilitates collaboration with our internal and external business partners. This role indirectly supports client engagement and experience by ensuring technically sound and high quality solutions are being delivered by the Infrastructure organization providing support and value to the business.

What will the employee do in this role?

Operational Leadership:

• Provides management, leadership and continued development to the Infrastructure teams
• Lead daily operations of infrastructure teams, ensuring process execution, timely delivery of services, and resolution of issues.
• Ensure Infrastructure team monitor system health and implement proactive improvements.
• In conjunction with the Infrastructure teams, oversee and maintain health of the Infrastructure operational process - including System management, KTLO activities, and Release management – ensuring documentation and implementation practices
• Drives and leads root cause analysis efforts and define remediation steps for any encountered infrastructure incidents

Infrastructure Oversight:

• Manage and maintain core infrastructure platforms including servers, storage, networking, virtualization, and cloud services
• Ensure high availability, performance, and disaster recovery capabilities

Security & Compliance:

• Enforce security protocols and ensure compliance with standards such as Nist, HIPAA, ISO, and GxP
• Support audits and regulatory reviews

Strategic Planning & Execution:

• Assist in developing and establishing implementation of infrastructure strategies aligned with business objectives
• Provides understanding and direction to Infrastructure teams of the IT Infrastructure and Cloud strategies
• Contribute to evaluation of emerging technologies to enhance infrastructure capabilities

Project & Vendor Management:

• In conjunction with Infrastructure team managers, ensure effective management and execution of infrastructure-related projects and initiatives
• Manage vendor relationships and contracts for hardware, software, and services
• Engage and build strong relationships with external vendor and internal business partners that enables Infrastructure team to provide business value easier and faster

Team Development:

• Supervise and mentor infrastructure staff
• Promote professional development and performance management

Collaboration & Communication:

• Work closely with IT leadership, business units, and external partners
• Communicate infrastructure plans, status, and risks to stakeholders
• Ensures communication and coordination across the business is occurring for production releases, maintenance windows and during production-down scenarios

What roles will this employee lead?

• Monitors and measures success of the Infrastructure team by utilizing an agreed upon set of metrics and ensures availability to Senior Leadership
• Responsible for executing established HR practices within the Infrastructure team, which include all aspects of performance management, approving PTO, coordinating and approving training requests, and personal goal setting
• In this highly technical team, continually grow the soft and technical skills of team members
• Creates an environment of collaboration and inclusion

Skills & Qualifications

Education

• Preferred – Bachelor’s Degree in a Business-related or Information Systems related area of study or equivalent work experience

Work Experience

• 8+ years of experience in IT infrastructure, with 3+ years in a leadership role.
• Experience with enterprise networking, cloud platforms (Azure, AWS), and compute services architecture.

Certifications             

• Certifications such as ITIL, ITSM, CISSP, PMP are a plus.

Required Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Excellent communication and collaboration
• Ability to transition between technical and business content
• Strong leadership and team management, fostering a safe and open environment
• Strategic thinking, critical thinking, and problem-solving
• Experience in troubleshooting production issues
• Technical expertise in infrastructure systems
• Budgeting and vendor negotiation

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