About Convene Inc.
Convene, Inc. is a Tampa based, award-winning technology services organization with offices and resources throughout the US, Mexico, and India. We have successful, referenceable customers, competitive benefits, and high-growth opportunities.
Role: Director of IT Engineering
Purpose of the Position: This position is foundational and critical to the success of the Company's digital transformation initiative, as all other information system and data technology will rely upon the cloud architecture, infrastructure, governance, security, and communications capability established by this role and team. The Director will lead the planning, design, implementation, security and governance of all cloud (and on premise until fully migrated) compute, networking, storage, and web services primarily on the Microsoft Azure platform and including responsibility for capacity and performance planning, management, costing/ budgeting, incident response, backup and recovery, administration and security of the platform.
Key Responsibilities:
Functional:
Own the outcome. Execute as one collectively with IT peers and stakeholders.
As a culture shaper and builder, model company values.
Lead a high-performance team.
Inclusive leadership: adaptive and open growth mindset towards learning, embracing diversity, and inter-cultural awareness. Fosters new ideas and drives the continual learning and professional competency of self and team.
Demonstrate strategic vision, anticipate future trends, and incorporate knowledge of successful applications of information technology to ensure information technology efforts align with organizational objectives.
Collaboratively plan with IT leadership counterparts to establish transformation direction, technology requirements, roadmaps (priority, timing) and funding requirements, aligned with Corporate strategic plans.
Design, plan and implement a highly available, performant, fluidly scalable, secure, and cost-effective infrastructure, and operations capability to enable best-in-class data and information system, data products, and services.
Relentlessly pursue continuous improvement and automation.
Recruit, develop and retain highly competent, accountable, and self-directed infrastructure engineering team members.
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 platform cost and performance. Implement accountability reporting to align cost drivers with organizational management responsibility.
Develop and execute cloud migration project plans, including cost, time and resource requirements mapped to the application and data capability drivers.
Establish and maintain a cost-effective, high-quality stable of strategic external partners who augment CLIENT team members as needed for cost effectiveness, variable demand, or skill depth.
Drive the cultural changes necessary to enable modern agile (most likely based on the scaled agile framework), DevSecOps practices (on the Microsoft DevOps platform), including automation, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, and continuous integration capabilities.
Maintain seamless planning and execution with and service to information system, data, and security counterparts.
Collaborate with the IT Architecture team to align with and develop future state reference architectures and engineering practices. capex
Maintain deep understanding of business processes and how they map to the technology stack.
Establish meaningful, leading information system OKRs, KPIs, metrics. • Develop and manage the opex / capex budgets.
Team Member Leadership Qualities:
Model for each assigned team member compliant and effective job performance and competency in areas aligned with CLIENT's mission and values.
Support the hiring and onboarding of IT team members as needed.
Model CLIENT values.
Demonstrate personal honesty and integrity.
Support Institutional Initiatives:
Keep current on institutional goals, objectives, and progress.
Engage in institutional sponsored activities and initiatives as appropriate.
Lead with courage in support of change initiatives that impact organization.
Manage and assist in coordinating efforts between departments within CLIENT.
Compliance:
Demonstrate knowledge of, and carefully follow all applicable federal and state compliance requirements and regulations including those prescribed by the Department of Education, accrediting agencies, CIE, and internal CLIENT policies and procedures.
Effectively communicate compliance requirements to students and other staff as appropriate and quickly escalate any compliance concerns to the Compliance department.
Work Experience, Skills & Abilities:
Minimum Requirements:
Bachelor's degree and or equivalent combination of education and work experience in a technical discipline.
Ability to demonstrate that they have built and managed high performing teams.
Minimum 10 years' experience designing, planning, and implementing enterprise-level IT engineering and operations solutions, ideally raising maturity or people, process, and technology and in automating processes.
Referenceable expert knowledge of the Microsoft Azure platform and engineering a resilient, scalable and performant technology 'fabric'.
Comfortable bi-modally improving today's solutions while timely building and migrating to the future through a portfolio of significant, parallel initiatives.
Experience implementing DevSecOps practices and processes, including CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring / measuring processes.
Information-based, decision-making mindset, strong analytical and technical capabilities to assess and drive process improvements and solve complex problems. • Motivated to inclusively collaborate with and serve others in achieving outcomes while acting as a member of senior IT leadership.
Adept at communicating with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Ability to lead teams via influence through ambiguity and complexity to a new way of working and to support program, process, and organizational improvements across the organization.
Natural curiosity to learn, ask questions, identify mistaken assumptions, and bring an open[1]minded approach. A high level of initiative and results focused.
Ability to manage fully remote teams.
Critical thinking and business acumen.
Proficiency with programming/scripting automation (e.g., PowerShell, Power Automate, BASH, Python).
Preferred Requirements:
Advanced Microsoft Azure Certifications (e.g., Azure Architect, DevOps Expert, Systems Engineer).