Overview
Our client is an established and growing financial services company. They are looking for a leader for their IT Infrastructure and Operations. This position, reporting to the CTO, will oversee end-to-end architecture, engineering, and support for infrastructure, and oversee desktop and application support, including helpdesk. The current team size is 50-60 individuals, a mixture of full-time employees and outsourced contractors. In addition to leadership, this individual will be tasked with maturing the function, providing metrics and measurability to help the organization better plan and assess effectiveness and efficiency.
Description
Our client is embarking on a major transformation program to digitize their business to support aggressive growth targets through cloud migration, infrastructure & operations modernization, ITIL process enhancements, DevOps & Automation, etc. This is a rare opportunity to not only change the organization but influence the life insurance industry to deliver improved customer experience. They are looking for a senior IT executive who can lead them to target state by building self-managing teams that are able to design and transform leading edge IT infrastructure and operations. Must possess transformation experience and be a change advocate for the team, department, and organization. Foster, build, and lead a team who are empowered to continually improve. Work directly with stakeholders to understand needs, gaps, opportunities, and develop infrastructure and telecommunication practices to meet the organization demands and support corporate goals.
Key Outcome / Responsibilities:
- Ensure infrastructure solutions are compliant with corporate policies/standards and state regulations. Stay abreast of new policies/regulations to ensure proper planning & budgeting is completed in advance of compliant timeframes
- Establish service level agreements with business users and regularly report KPI’s on service measurements to business and management teams
- Assess and manage infrastructure (hardware, software, and network) risks. Report risks to senior management along with mitigation recommendations
- Architect, build, and maintain best in class hosting environments for enterprise applications in on premise data center and cloud
- Maintain hardware/software asset management and CMDB including maintenance of network component inventory, life cycle management, and related documentation
- Ensures the highest levels of database server performance and stability through monitoring, optimization, and disaster recovery planning
- Monitor, manage and maintain the computing and telecommunications infrastructure resilience, capacity planning, as well as security design and implementation
- Research new technologies, making recommendations to senior management, forecasting future needs/capacity planning, and participating in the strategic planning/evolution of the company’s internal and outsourced systems, security and business continuity requirements that are scalable to meet the company’s growth expectations
- Perform capacity planning to ensure that network capacity aligns with short-term and long-term strategic plans.
- Provide guidance and career mentoring to staff. Identify role progression and suggest training and certification goals. Hold regular 1-on-1 meetings with staff to stay abreast of staff issues and provide feedback on staff performance
- Direct team assignments and work plan. Provide clarity on team project priorities and empower the team to deliver solutions using Agile Scrum methodologies that continually improve effectiveness and deliver value to the business. Hold regular team meetings to ensure open communication with team members
- Develop and manage infrastructure budget. Perform comprehensive budget planning to ensure business infrastructure needs are considered. Manage costs to the agreed annual budget
Specific Skills, Knowledge & Capabilities:
- 15+ years of IT infrastructure leadership experience with at least 10 years in a leadership role that includes 5+ years of experience in a hands-on Infrastructure or software development role and 3+ years of experience working with public cloud services provider like Azure or AWS
- Passion for excellence in infrastructure and operations modernization, advancing infrastructure capabilities, automation, and proactive monitoring.
- Direct management of budgets in excess of $25M
- Direct management of cross-functional, hybrid (Onsite-Offshore), matrixed teams, including working with third party service providers
- End to end infrastructure lifecycle experience, inclusive of networks, servers, storage, data centers, databases, middleware and web/application environments
- Experience in Agile methodology such as Scaled Agile, SAFe, Scrum etc.
- Experience with Devops / CI-CD pipeline implementation and design
- Experience in design, support and manage end to end architecture that supports High availability, reliability, scalability and performance
- Security concepts and systems hardening techniques to secure PCI and PII information
- Practical knowledge of ITIL application processes and implementation, as it relates to DevOps and Agile processes
- Experience in project definition and management
- Experience in developing technology roadmaps and strategies
- Ability to understand and breakdown complex problems and frame problems to create cross team alignment and effective solution ideation
- Deep understanding of infrastructure automation, instrumentation and monitoring platforms
- Proven success leading large-scale transformations
- Ability to solve complex problems independently and collaboratively. Exceptional analytical, conceptual and problem-solving abilities
- Ability to comfortably interact & communicate with all levels of the organization. Excellent presentation skills including to Executive audiences
- Strong presentation and interpersonal skills. Strong negotiation and consensus building skills are required
- Prior experience in internal audit, risk management or independent data validation roles is a plus
- Strong leadership and management skills - creates and drives strategic vision, mentoring and coaching of staff and continuous feedback and support through effective planning and tracking
- Proven solid written and oral communication skills with the ability to effectively communicate status and issues to executive management
- Proven stakeholder management and ability to interact at all levels using expert presentation skills and material to effectively communicate and influence stakeholders
- Proven experience in IT leadership, with a clear track record of meeting SLA’s and KPI’s
Qualifications Required:
- BS in Computer Science or equivalent; MBA and/or Master’s Degree preferred
- Technical certifications (MSCE, MCP, MOS, CCNA, CCDA, CISSP, etc.)
- ITIL Certification preferred
