Director of Cloud and Core Operations

Work schedule:

Normal Business Hours (Hybrid work model) 

General Description:

The Director of Cloud and Core Operations reports to the Senior Director of IT Operations within the CTO organization. This role is responsible for overseeing the maintenance and optimization of both cloud and on-prem infrastructure and DHTS IT Services, ensuring seamless operations, adherence to service level agreements (SLAs), and continuous improvement of services.  This role requires a strong understanding of cloud computing principles, managing infrastructure services, application support, incident management, leadership skills, and a commitment to delivering high-quality services to our customers. This position will be responsible for a team of six direct reports. 

Key Responsibilities:

1. Leadership and Staffing: Direct a team of IT Managers overseeing 24x7x365 operations center, ensuring appropriate staffing levels and talent mix to handle incidents and requests effectively.  Lead and mentor a team of IT professionals, ensuring effective staffing and operational support for our IT environments.

2. Strategic Infrastructure Management: Develop strategies to optimize cloud and on-prem infrastructure for efficiency, reliability, and scalability, aligning with organizational goals and objectives. Oversee the provisioning, configuration, and management of DevOps tools and platforms, including CI/CD pipelines, version control systems, and automated testing frameworks.

3. Collaboration with Stakeholders: Work closely with stakeholders to understand their IT Services related needs and deliver solutions that meet or exceed their expectations.

4. Ensuring Compliance and Security: Maintain compliance with relevant regulations and standards, particularly in healthcare settings, ensuring the highest standards of data security and privacy.

5. Monitoring and Optimization: Implement monitoring tools and practices to proactively identify and address issues, optimize resource utilization, and improve overall IT Services performance.

6. Security and Compliance: Collaborate with security teams to enforce cloud and on-prem security best practices and ensure compliance with industry regulations and standards.

7. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: Maintain and execute disaster recovery and business continuity plans to minimize downtime and data loss in case of system failures or disasters.

8. Service Delivery and Standardization: Collaborate with Service Owner leads to deliver standardized and operational services for various cloud and on-prem infrastructure components, including networks, compute, application delivery, databases, storage, and voice services.

9. Continuous Improvement: Drive the adoption of best practices such as ITIL, DevOps, and ML Ops, championing a customer-centric culture focused on growth and continuous improvement.

10. Incident Management and Resolution: Lead the triage and resolution of production incidents, collaborating with stakeholders to assess impacts and develop action plans for resolution and mitigation.

11. Vendor Management: Manage relationships with vendors and service providers, ensuring Duke receives optimal service levels and support.

12. Budget and Resource Management:  Develop and manage operating and capital budgets, establishing service-based costing models and talent plans for the department.  Manage cloud-related budgets and resources, optimizing costs while maintaining high levels of performance and security.

13. Personnel Management: Perform personnel management functions for direct reports, including scheduling, hiring, evaluations, performance reviews, and corrective actions as necessary.

14. Strategic Planning: Develop and implement strategic and tactical plans for customer support/service operations, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and objectives.

15. Service Level Management: Establish and maintain high levels of customer support service, including the development of operating policies, processes, and procedures consistent with best practices and SLAs.

16. Communication and Collaboration: Engage with customers, vendors, and internal stakeholders to facilitate communication of Service Operations activities, issues, and efforts to restore services.

17. Training and Development: Create and maintain comprehensive talent plans for Core Operations, including training and career progression opportunities for staff members.

Qualifications:

- Experience: Ten years of related experience in 24x7 operations management, incident and business management, call center management, software deployment, cloud operations with 5-8 years in a leadership/management position.  Experience in infrastructure services, application support, DevOps principles, and data center operations preferred.

Bachelor's degree in a business or technical field required; or combination of education and technical experience.

 Master's degree preferred.

- Certification: ITIL Certification preferred.  Relevant certifications such as Azure Administrator Associate or Azure Solutions Architect Expert are a plus.-

- Knowledge of infrastructure as code (IaC) tools and methodologies (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes).

- Experience with DevOps practices, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), and automation tools.

- Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities: Strong foundation in Service Management, budgetary and resource management skills, excellent communication and presentation skills, analytical and solution-oriented mindset, superior leadership and conflict management skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

- Experience supporting IT Operations in a hospital environment, familiarity with healthcare systems such as Epic, and knowledge of Duke Medicine's business environment.

Duke is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer committed to providing employment opportunity without regard to an individual's age, color, disability, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or veteran status.

Duke aspires to create a community built on collaboration, innovation, creativity, and belonging. Our collective success depends on the robust exchange of ideas—an exchange that is best when the rich diversity of our perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences flourishes. To achieve this exchange, it is essential that all members of the community feel secure and welcome, that the contributions of all individuals are respected, and that all voices are heard. All members of our community have a responsibility to uphold these values.

Essential Physical Job Functions: Certain jobs at Duke University and Duke University Health System may include essentialjob functions that require specific physical and/or mental abilities. Additional information and provision for requests for reasonable accommodation will be provided by each hiring department.