Director, IT Operations

UMA is a nonprofit healthcare educational institution with a national presence. Headquartered in Tampa, Florida and founded in 1994, UMA offers content-rich, interactive online programs as well as hands-on training at our Clearwater, Florida campus.

• Anticipated starting salary of $165,000; pay rate negotiable based on experience and qualifications.
• Medical (including prescription), Dental, Vision (UMA subsidized)
• FSA/HSA (Depending on Medical Plan chosen)
• $50,000 Life Insurance (UMA paid)
• Additional Voluntary Life Insurance (Team Member paid)
• Employee Assistance Program – EAP (UMA paid)
• Long Term Disability (UMA paid)
• Short Term Disability (Team Member paid)
• Supplemental Insurance such as Critical Illness, Accident, and Hospital (Team Member Paid)
• Paid Time Off – 15 days accrued in year 1, 9 holidays, and 1 day of Volunteering Time Off
• 401k (eligible upon completion of 90 days of employment and must be at least 21 years of age)
• Pet Insurance
• Identity Theft Protection

• 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.
• Foster 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.
• Ensure highly available, performant, fluidly scalable, secure, and cost-effective IT operations capabilities to enable best-in-class data and information system and data products and services.
• Develop, implement, and maintain an unfailing platform (OS, hardware, firmware, certificates, etc.) update and patching programs.
• 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 operations cost and performance. Implement accountability reporting to align cost drivers with organizational management responsibility.
• Lead in development, and implementation of IT infrastructure that improves the stability, scalability, availability, and latency of the infrastructure and data / information systems.
• Partner with IT teams to execute and realize technology and organizational strategy.
• Ensure a comprehensive business continuity and incident recovery capability, including compute, storage, integrations, network, communications, and related resources.
• Establish and maintain a cost-effective, high-quality stable of strategic external partners who augment UMA 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.
• 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.
• Partners with IT Security to enhance corporate security posture, mitigate, and remediate issues.
• Develop and maintain a configuration change management solution and lead the IT Change Management program to ensure efficient and reliable outcomes.
• Lead IT due diligence for merger and acquisition activities to timely, efficiently, and effectively integrate IT infrastructure and operations.
• Develop and manage proactive information technology monitoring capabilities (capacity, performance, forecasting, etc.) to ensure exceptional reliability and performance across all technology layers.
• Employ automation and continuous integration, continuous deployment methodologies to enable infrastructure as code capabilities to the data and application teams.

• Model for each assigned team member compliant and effective job performance and competency in areas aligned with UMA’s mission and values.
• Support the hiring and onboarding of IT team members as needed.
• Model UMA values.
• Demonstrate personal honesty and integrity.

• 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
• Manages and assists in coordinating efforts between departments within UMA

• Exceed all IT General Controls requirements and pass audits.
• 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 UMA policies and procedures.
• Effectively communicate compliance requirements to students and other staff as appropriate and quickly escalate any compliance concerns to the Compliance department.

• 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 planning and implementing enterprise-level, high availability, multi-site IT infrastructure and operating solutions, ideally raising maturity or people, process, and technology and in automating processes.
• Knowledge of networking, Active Directory / Azure Active Directory / Azure AD B2C, storage, virtualization, laaS, PaaS, and SaaS, web services, security / single sign-on, integration solutions and approaches.
• Comprehensive knowledge of performance scaling and disaster recovery architecture and operations, including storage area network, redundant, highly available server, and network architectures.
• 5 years’ experience planning, deploying, and managing Microsoft Azure compute, storage, network, data, security, and related resources, including optimizing performance, capacity, and cost.
• Experience recruiting and building highly capable IT operations teams, processes, and solutions from the ground up.
• Experience with IT General Controls and related requirements.
• Comfortable bi-modally managing and improving legacy 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 senior member of 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-minded approach. A high level of initiative and results focused.
• Ability to manage fully remote teams.
• Critical thinking and business acumen.
• Able to professionally communicate verbally and in written English.

• Applicable certifications (e.g., Site Reliability Engineer Practitioner, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Certified System Engineer, ITIL, Lean Six Sigma, etc.)
• Experience with audit, legal and compliance processes (e.g., ITGC audits, legal discovery, and forensics).
• Proficiency with programming/scripting automation (e.g., PowerShell, Power Automate, BASH, Python).

• Home office.
• Up to 10% of travel required.
• Flexibility to work evenings and weekends as needed.

• Requires long periods of sitting at a desk working on a computer.
• Requires ability to travel.
• Requires occasional bending, stooping, and squatting.
• Requires occasional lifting of up to 10 lbs.