Director of Network & Data Center Infrastructure

Albany Medical Center•Albany, NY

About The Position

The Director of Network and Data Center Infrastructure is responsible for the architecture, design, engineering, implementation, security, resilience, and lifecycle management of Albany Med Health System’s enterprise network and data center platforms. The role directs physical, virtual, hybrid-cloud, and multi-cloud infrastructure strategy; establishes design standards; oversees operational reliability; and leads technical teams, vendors, contracts, and statements of work. The Director partners with Information Security, application teams, clinical and business leaders, and external service providers to ensure solutions are secure, supportable, cost-effective, interoperable, and aligned with organizational priorities. The Director provides technical and people leadership across network and data center engineering, client server, and datacenter teams. The role sets architecture and operational standards, oversees platform and vendor rationalization, manages technology roadmaps and lifecycle risks, and provides executive technical leadership during major incidents. It also governs designs and operations for enterprise networking, data center compute, storage, virtualization, cloud connectivity, security, resilience, and disaster recovery.

Responsibilities

Present architecture decisions, investment options, risks, tradeoffs, and recommendations to executives, governance bodies, technical teams, and customers.
Build partnerships with clinical, business, application, security, facilities, biomedical, and service-management leaders to translate requirements into resilient, supportable infrastructure solutions.
Assign accountable design authorities and ensure engineers produce documentation, implementation and validation plans, operational runbooks, monitoring requirements, rollback procedures, and knowledge-transfer materials.
Lead, coach, and develop network and data center engineering teams, client server team, and datacenter team; establish role clarity, succession plans, cross-training, technical standards, and professional development paths.
Provide transparent reporting on architecture compliance, capacity, availability, incidents, lifecycle risk, technical debt, project delivery, vendor performance, and roadmap progress.
Partner with Procurement, Finance, Legal, and vendors on requests for proposal, contracts, licensing, statements of work, service-level expectations, and performance reviews.
Develop business cases and recommendations for platform consolidation, refresh, migration, renewal, or retirement using cost, risk, capability, supportability, and strategic-fit criteria.
Maintain technology standards, approved-product lists, lifecycle roadmaps, and exception processes for network and data center platforms.
Lead rationalization of network, data center, virtualization, monitoring, automation, and management tools to reduce duplication, simplify support, improve security, and optimize licensing and operating costs.
Review cloud and data center designs for architectural fit, operational readiness, security, financial sustainability, and exit or portability considerations.
Oversee hybrid-cloud network architecture, cloud landing-zone connectivity, routing, segmentation, DNS, identity integration, monitoring, egress control, and resilient connectivity.
Establish workload-placement criteria based on clinical and business criticality, data sensitivity, latency, availability, recovery, integration, performance, operational support, and cost.
Define secure connectivity and integration patterns among Albany Med data centers, Microsoft Azure and other approved cloud services, software-as-a-service platforms, partners, and remote locations.
Document, prioritize, and communicate risks, lifecycle exposure, single points of failure, and unsupported technologies through actionable remediation roadmaps.
Provide executive technical leadership during major incidents, coordinating containment, restoration, vendor escalation, root-cause analysis, corrective actions, and risk mitigation.
Oversee high-availability, backup connectivity, disaster recovery, business continuity, capacity, redundancy, and failover standards; ensure recovery designs are documented and regularly tested.
Partner with Information Security to define and enforce Cisco data center security standards, firewall and access-control patterns, secure remote access, micro segmentation, threat detection, and auditable configuration baselines.
Ensure infrastructure designs and operations support Albany Med policies and healthcare, privacy, and security requirements, including HIPAA and relevant NIST-based controls; coordinate PCI DSS requirements where payment-card environments are in scope.
Embed security-by-design and zero-trust principles into network and data center architectures, including segmentation, least privilege, secure management access, encryption, hardening, logging, vulnerability remediation, and control-plane, data-plane, and endpoint protections.
Provide design oversight for high-performance and low-latency networking, including GPU and AI cluster connectivity where business and clinical requirements justify its use.
Drive adoption of infrastructure-as-code, network automation, configuration assurance, orchestration, API integration, and performance optimization to improve consistency, deployment speed, and operational reliability.
Define target-state architectures and roadmaps for data center modernization, consolidation, workload placement, private cloud, public cloud connectivity, edge services, and platform migration.
Provide architectural oversight for data center compute, storage, virtualization, and hyperconverged platforms, including VMware and Nutanix solutions, and align server, storage, network, backup, security, and application dependencies.
Maintain expert understanding of Cisco data center and enterprise networking technologies, including Nexus platforms, ACI and NX-OS architectures, EVPN/VXLAN fabrics, routing and switching, wireless, SD-WAN, network access control, firewalls, identity-based segmentation, telemetry, and management platforms.
Lead technical due diligence, proof-of-concept activities, vendor evaluations, and design validation before production adoption.
Chair or participate in architecture review and change-governance forums, documenting decisions, risks, exceptions, technical debt, and remediation plans.
Ensure designs include scalability, capacity, interoperability, supportability, observability, security, high availability, disaster recovery, lifecycle management, and total-cost-of-ownership requirements.
Oversee modern data center fabric designs and deployments, including leaf-spine architectures, EVPN/VXLAN, high-speed core routing and switching, segmentation, multi-tenancy, and resilient inter-data-center connectivity.
Provide architecture governance across enterprise routing, switching, wireless, data center fabrics, Internet and WAN connectivity, load balancing, firewalls, DNS, DHCP, IP address management, network management, compute, storage, virtualization, and hyperconverged infrastructure.
Direct the creation, review, approval, and maintenance of High-Level Designs (HLDs), Low-Level Designs (LLDs), reference architectures, standards, and implementation patterns for on-premises, hybrid-cloud, and multi-cloud environments.
Collaborate with other health care organizations for best practices and knowledge sharing.