Key Responsibilities:

• Lead a team of technical professionals to deliver IT services that meet industry best practices and support business objectives across infrastructure, security, and end user support. Collaborate with other departments across the company to understand needs and then provide IT solutions.
• Provide oversight, management, and mentoring for team leads responsible for delivery areas. Support a culture of teamwork and excellence.
• Establish I&O best practices, standard work processes, procedures, and guidelines for IT operations management (e.g. change control; data protection and recovery; release, and patch management, etc.)
• Develop and execute strategic I&O roadmaps.
• Manage vendor evaluation, selection, contract negotiations, and governance of IT service providers / strategic partners.
• Administer and be accountable to annual budgets (Capex and Opex) for IT infrastructure.

Systems and Infrastructure

• Lead planning and execution of infrastructure modernization initiatives, including cloud migrations, data center consolidations, and legacy system retirements.
• Architect and design secure, resilient enterprise infrastructure platforms to support required business capabilities.
• Maintain maximum uptime and performance of business-critical systems through monitoring, capacity planning, upgrades, and redundancy.
• Evaluate innovative infrastructure technologies in areas like virtualization, containers, software-defined networking, storage, and orchestration. Develop adoption roadmaps.
• Plan and coordinate major infrastructure projects, overseeing impact analyses, specifications, vendor selection, purchases, contracts, and deployment.
• Develop infrastructure standards and guidelines covering network protocols, hardware specifications, system security principles, data retention policies. Ensure compliance.

Planning and Budgeting

• Stay informed about emerging technologies and trends, providing strategic recommendations for their implementation.
• Create short-range (1 year) and long-range (3-5 year) roadmaps for IT infrastructure to align with business objectives.
• Conduct annual budgeting process for Capex investments and Opex spending.
• Analyze ROI, TCO, and document justification for major technology acquisitions and initiatives.
• Continuously monitor and optimize utilization of existing infrastructure to optimize costs.

Security and Compliance

• Conduct comprehensive security risk assessments identifying threats, vulnerabilities, and potential business impacts.
• Maintain security policies, controls, and procedures across all technology systems and data to reduce risk.
• Implement technologies and processes for access management, data protection, monitoring, encryption, and endpoint security.
• Ensure compliance with regulations including GDPR and other privacy laws, PCI DSS, etc. through security controls and auditing.
• Continuously monitor systems and data access to identify anomalies and prevent cyber-attacks.
• Define and implement controls following established frameworks like NIST and ISO
• Maintain disaster recovery plans including failover infrastructure, backups, and procedures.
• Develop and execute tabletop exercises to evaluate and improve incident response plans.
• Provide security awareness training to employees on best practices for handing data and threats.
• Participate as a key member of the incident response team during security events.
• Research and recommend new security technologies and services as threats evolve.
• Consult with third party vendors to ensure compliant data handling as per contracts.
• Represent security interests with regulators and during third party security assessments.
• Benchmark security metrics against peers and identify opportunities for improvement.

Qualifications:

• Degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or a related field. Advanced degree or relevant certifications (e.g., ITIL, PMP) are a plus.
• 5+ years of experience in an IT management role with proven experience leading teams of 4 or more people.
• 2+ years specifically managing cyber security programs / experience with industry leading cyber tools.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and develop high-performing teams.
• Expertise with systems architecture, virtualization, data centers, networks, security, and cloud platforms.
• Experience contracting and managing outsourced IT service providers.
• Firsthand experience with Microsoft products including Azure, Office 365, Windows Server.
• Knowledge of IT service management frameworks (e.g. ITIL).
• Experience with budget management.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills. Strong presentation abilities are a must.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to adapt to a fast-paced environment and make informed decisions under pressure.
• Experience with M&A integrations.
• Experience working in the Manufacturing or Distribution industry (i.e. shop floor environment) strongly preferred.