Director, IT Infrastructure Services

About the role

Shield AI, a venture-backed defense-tech company, is looking for a Director of IT Infrastructure Services. The role leads the strategy, engineering, delivery and operational excellence of the enterprise infrastructure services across Network Engineering, Cloud Platform Engineering and Infrastructure Services, ensuring availability, performance, scalability, security and cost efficiency of the global technology foundation. It reports on three organizations: Network Engineering, Cloud Platform Engineering and IT Infrastructure Engineering.

Key responsibilities

• Develop and execute the multi-year IT infrastructure strategy and roadmap across networking, cloud, on-premises infrastructure, data centers, cloud identity and automation.
• Lead, mentor and scale the Infrastructure Services leadership team.
• Set up a service delivery model with service ownership, escalation paths, SLAs, capacity planning, lifecycle management and performance metrics.
• Oversee network services (routing, switching, WAN, SD-WAN, VPN, firewalls, NAC, observability) and ensure high availability and strong security.
• Lead cloud platform engineering, including cloud architecture, IaC, DevOps enablement, cloud identity, networking, monitoring, logging, resilience and cost optimization.
• Drive infrastructure automation via infrastructure as code, configuration management, CI/CD, self-service provisioning and runbooks.
• Oversee on-premises compute, storage, virtualization, backup and recovery, data center operations and colocation services.
• Embed security-by-design with Cybersecurity and align with other business units on infrastructure needs and site expansion.
• Lead incident management, executive communications during outages, and set operational KPIs and executive reporting.
• Own infrastructure financial planning, budgeting, vendor negotiations and cost optimization, and build vendor relationships.

Required profile

• 12+ years of progressive experience in enterprise IT infrastructure, cloud platforms, networking or systems engineering.
• 5+ years of leadership experience managing managers and leading multi-functional infrastructure, cloud and network engineering organizations.
• Demonstrated experience building and leading high-performing teams in security-conscious, high-growth environments.

Required skills

• Enterprise network architecture and operations (routing, switching, WAN, VPN, firewalls, segmentation, NAC, observability)
• Cloud platforms, cloud identity, IaC, DevOps and infrastructure automation
• On-premises infrastructure, data center and colocation operations, backup and recovery
• Service management: incident, problem and change management, SLAs, dashboards, root-cause analysis
• High availability, business continuity and disaster recovery