Executive Director of IT Infrastructure (internal only)

UMass Lowell • Lowell, MA

17h

About The Position

This being an internal opportunity, only current UML Employees, irrespective of Bargaining units are eligible to apply for this position. Under the direction of the Associate Vice Chancellor of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, the Executive Director of IT Infrastructure is the senior leader responsible for the reliability, resilience, and strategic evolution of UMass Lowell’s core IT infrastructure. This role provides unified leadership across Network Services and Systems Engineering to ensure that the university’s foundational technology platforms consistently support teaching, learning, research, and administrative operations at the level expected of an R1 institution. Success in this role is measured by infrastructure stability, availability, and the institution’s ability to depend on technology to achieve its mission during routine operations as well as during incidents and periods of disruption. The Executive Director is accountable for ensuring that infrastructure services are architected, designed, operated, and continuously improved to meet institutional priorities, research demands, and evolving academic needs. The Executive Director serves as the primary coordinator and operational leader for infrastructure-related incidents. When significant outages or degradation occur, this role assumes responsibility for incident leadership, providing direction, coordination, and decision-making across teams. While Directors retain deep technical authority within their domains, the Executive Director ensures cross-functional coordination, unified response, clear communication, and timely restoration of services. In addition to operational accountability, the Executive Director is a key architect of the university’s infrastructure strategy. Working collaboratively with the CIO and Directors, this role sets strategic direction for network, compute, storage, identity, cloud, and hybrid platforms. The position emphasizes architectural coherence, cross-domain integration, and disciplined lifecycle planning to ensure infrastructure investments deliver long-term institutional value. This role has responsibility to eliminate operational and architectural silos between infrastructure teams, provide clear accountability for uptime and resilience, and enable Directors and their teams to operate with focus and clarity. The Executive Director partners closely with the Associate CIO for IT Operations to ensure that infrastructure platforms and services enable reliable, seamless, and world-class end-user experiences across teaching, learning, research, and administrative functions. The Executive Director empowers technical leaders to execute effectively while ensuring alignment, consistency, and shared outcomes across all infrastructure services.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• Minimum of twelve years of progressively responsible experience in enterprise IT infrastructure environments.
• At least eight years of leadership experience managing senior technical professionals or managers.
• Demonstrated success leading highly reliable, complex infrastructure environments.
• Strong understanding of enterprise networking, systems engineering, cloud, and hybrid infrastructure architectures.
• Proven ability to lead during high-pressure incidents and make sound decisions under uncertainty.
• Experience aligning infrastructure services with academic, research, and institutional priorities.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to explain complex infrastructure concepts to non-technical audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to foster collaboration across technical teams and organizational boundaries.
• Working knowledge of IT service management practices, including incident management, request fulfillment, escalation management, and service improvement.
• ITIL Certification or the ability to achieve certification within 3 months.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in Information Technology, Engineering, business, or a related discipline is strongly preferred.
• Previous experience in higher education is strongly preferred.
• Experience supporting research computing or data-intensive academic environments.
• Background in higher education or similarly complex, mission-driven organizations.
• Experience leading large-scale infrastructure modernization initiatives.
• Industry certifications or advanced training in infrastructure, cloud, or networking disciplines.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Number of Employees: 1-10 employees