Director, AI Operations

Zayo Group•Washington, DC

About The Position

Zayo provides mission-critical bandwidth to the world’s most impactful companies, fueling the innovations that are transforming our society. Zayo’s 141,000-mile network in North America and Europe includes extensive metro connectivity to thousands of buildings and data centers. Zayo’s communications infrastructure solutions include dark fiber, private data networks, wavelengths, Ethernet, and dedicated Internet access. Zayo serves wireless and wireline carriers, media, tech, content, finance, healthcare and other large enterprises. Zayo is looking for a Director, AI Operations (AIOps), who will lead Operational Automation and Self-Service Enablement across IT. This director role will be responsible for using AI to automate triage and remediation, expand self-service, and reduce ServiceDesk dependency while improving reliability, customer experience, and operational efficiency.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field, or a total of 14 years of related experience in lieu of education
Minimum of ten (10) years of related field experience in IT Operations, Service Delivery, SRE, or operational excellence
Minimum of six (6) years previous managerial experience leading multi-disciplinary operations/automation teams is required.
Proven experience implementing automation and self-service capabilities that materially reduce ServiceDesk ticket volume and manual effort.
Experience with ITSM tools and processes (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira Service Management; incident/problem/change; service catalog).
Practical knowledge of applying Generative AI/LLMs in operations (virtual agents, knowledge retrieval/RAG, summarization, runbook assistance) with appropriate security and governance.
Previous experience working in a dynamic, high-pressure production environment with customer-facing SLAs/SLOs.
Previous experience managing platforms with a large internal and/or external customer base.
Strong interpersonal and communication skills; ability to influence across engineering, security, and business stakeholders.
Demonstration of strong decision making, prioritization, and leadership skills with the ability to multi-task and adjust priorities based on workload.

Nice To Haves

Experience with AIOps and observability platforms (event management, anomaly detection, log/metric/trace analytics) is preferred.
Strong scripting/automation background (Python, PowerShell, Ansible, Terraform, CI/CD, workflow/orchestration tools) is preferred.
Cloud operations experience is preferred (AWS/Azure/GCP), including monitoring, reliability, and cost optimization.

Responsibilities

Create and drive a culture of ownership, innovation, collaboration, accountability, and safety; champion an automation-first and self-service mindset across IT Operations and Service Delivery.
Define and execute an AI-enabled operations strategy (AIOps/GenAI) that reduces ServiceDesk dependency through ticket deflection, automated triage, and self-healing workflows.
Provide managerial and technical leadership to operations engineering, SRE, and automation teams responsible for 24x7 service reliability.
Oversee workforce planning and resource allocation across operations teams, ensuring staffing levels, skill development, and scheduling align with business priorities and service criticality.
Establish and govern operational metrics (SLOs/SLAs, MTTR, change failure rate, automation coverage, ticket deflection) and ensure targets are met across platforms.
Own the design and delivery of self-service capabilities (service catalog, knowledge, virtual agent/chatbot) integrated with ITSM to streamline requests and reduce manual fulfillment.
Drive the observability and event management architecture (logs/metrics/traces, event correlation, anomaly detection) to proactively detect issues and accelerate diagnosis.
Standardize runbooks, playbooks, and automated remediation; implement orchestration/workflow automation to reduce operational toil and improve consistency.
Collaborate with application, security, network, and business teams to align operations strategy, automation roadmaps, and risk controls with enterprise goals.
Participate in compliance audits and continuously improve controls for automated change execution, data governance, and AI usage in operations.
Manage vendors and platforms supporting AIOps, ITSM, automation, and monitoring; evaluate emerging solutions and drive proof-of-value.
Provide leadership to Collaboration, In-office support teams
Manage the operations automation budget, ensuring initiatives are delivered on time and within budget while optimizing spend through standardization and consolidation.