Data Center IT Operations Manager

Compass Datacenters•Dallas, TX

About The Position

This role is responsible for keeping Compass Datacenters’ internal IT environments running once facilities are live and in production. That covers the servers, networking, storage, and security infrastructure that supports our operations—not customer colocation environments. You’ll manage the team that handles day-to-day administration, monitoring, patching, and incident response across all production sites. When something breaks at 2 AM, your team is the one that gets the call. When we need to plan capacity for the next round of site launches, you’re the one building that plan. This is a hands-on leadership role—you need to be close enough to the technology to make good calls, and experienced enough as a manager to build and run a reliable team.

Responsibilities

Production Infrastructure Operations
Server and compute: Oversee administration of Windows Server, VMware/Nutanix virtualization clusters, and associated storage environments across all production sites.
Network operations: Own the health and performance of the production network—switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, and WAN connectivity. Coordinate with the design team on changes and upgrades.
Monitoring and alerting: Make sure monitoring tools are configured, thresholds are tuned, and alerts go to the right people. Reduce noise so the team can focus on what matters.
Directory and identity services: Manage Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and identity/access management across the environment.
Backup and recovery: Own the backup strategy and make sure restores actually work. Run periodic recovery tests—don’t wait for a real disaster to find out.
Security Operations
Incident triage: Serve as the escalation point for security alerts from EDR/MDR tools. Make sure threats are investigated, contained, and resolved—not just acknowledged.
Patching and vulnerability management: Run the patching cycle across servers, network gear, and endpoints. Track vulnerabilities, prioritize based on actual risk, and close them out on a schedule.
Firewall and access control: Ensure firewall rules, WAF configurations, and access policies stay current and hardened. Clean up stale rules regularly.
Compliance alignment: Work within established security frameworks (NIST, CIS, or whatever Compass adopts) and support audit and compliance activities as needed.
Planning and Lifecycle Management
Capacity planning: Track utilization across compute, storage, and network resources. Forecast needs based on site launch schedules and growth.
Lifecycle management: Maintain a hardware and software lifecycle plan. Know what’s approaching end-of-life, what needs to be refreshed, and when.
Budget ownership: Own the IT operations budget. Track spend against forecast, manage renewals, and make the case for capital when it’s needed.
Site onboarding: Receive new sites from the construction/design team after commissioning. Validate that systems are built to standard and ready for production support.
Team and Vendor Management
Direct management: Lead a team of systems and network administrators. Set clear expectations, run regular 1:1s, do real performance reviews, and invest in developing your people.
On-call and coverage: Build and maintain an on-call rotation that provides 24/7 coverage without burning the team out.
Vendor relationships: Manage relationships with hardware, software, and support vendors. Own contract renewals, escalations, and service-level accountability.
Incident management: Run the incident response process for major outages. Lead root cause analysis after the fact and make sure corrective actions actually get implemented.