Head of IT & Infrastructure Operations

Guardian Life Insurance • Bethlehem, PA

5d

About The Position

The Head of IT & Infrastructure Operations is responsible for the overall reliability, performance, security, and operational excellence of the organization’s core technology infrastructure. This role provides strategic leadership and day-to-day oversight across four critical operational domains: L1/L2 Operations, Cloud Operations, System & Platform Operations, and Data Center Operations. The role ensures stable 24x7 operations, drives continuous improvement, strengthens resiliency and automation, and partners closely with Engineering, Security, Architecture, and Business stakeholders to enable scalable and resilient enterprise technology services.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in IT Infrastructure or Technology Operations, with significant leadership at scale.
• Proven experience leading multi‑domain operations (L1/L2 support, cloud, platforms, and data centers).
• Strong understanding of enterprise infrastructure technologies, cloud platforms, and operational frameworks (ITIL, SRE, etc.).
• Demonstrated success managing global, 24x7 operations and large, distributed teams.
• Experience driving operational transformation, automation, and resiliency initiatives.
• Strong executive presence, decision‑making, and communication skills.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in large, regulated enterprises (financial services, insurance, healthcare, or similar).
• Exposure to AIOps, automation and advanced observability practices.
• Strong vendor and managed services leadership experience.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve enterprise L1/L2 operational support functions, including the Enterprise Operations Center (EOC) and infrastructure support teams.
• Ensure effective incident, problem, and escalation management, with strong operational cadence and executive communication.
• Drive service stability, availability, and MTTR reduction through standard operating procedures and operational discipline.
• Establish clear runbooks, escalation paths, and shift handoffs for global, 24x7 coverage.
• Partner with ITSM leaders to continuously mature incident, problem, change, and event management practices.
• Lead cloud operations across public, private, and hybrid platforms, ensuring availability, performance, cost efficiency, and security.
• Define and enforce operational standards for cloud provisioning, monitoring, capacity management, and lifecycle management.
• Partner with Cloud Engineering and DevOps to drive automation, self-healing platforms, and operational readiness for new services.
• Oversee cloud financial management (FinOps), including cost optimization, forecasting, and chargeback/showback models.
• Ensure cloud platforms meet enterprise resiliency, compliance, and security requirements.
• Provide leadership for system and platform operations, including operating systems, virtualization, hardware, and enterprise platforms.
• Ensure platforms are stable, scalable, patched, and compliant with security and operational standards.
• Drive standardization and simplification of platforms to reduce operational toil and technical debt.
• Partner with Application, Platform, and DevOps teams to support production readiness, deployments, and lifecycle management.
• Champion proactive operations across platforms.
• Oversee data center operations, including primary and secondary colocation environments, facilities coordination, hardware lifecycle, and vendor management.
• Ensure strong controls for capacity planning, hardware refresh, power, cooling, and physical security.
• Own operational readiness for disaster recovery, high availability, and resilience testing related to data center services.
• Manage strategic relationships with data center and infrastructure service providers.
• Own the overall operational health of enterprise infrastructure services, including SLAs, OLAs, KPIs, and executive reporting.
• Provide people leadership across all four operational areas.
• Drive continuous improvement, automation, and operational maturity through metrics, root cause analysis, and corrective actions.
• Partner with Technology Risk, Security, and Compliance teams to meet regulatory and enterprise risk requirements.
• Develop and manage operational budgets, staffing models, and vendor contracts.
• Act as a senior escalation point during major incidents and crises.
• Contribute to enterprise technology strategy, resiliency initiatives, and long-term infrastructure roadmaps.

Benefits

• At Guardian, you’ll have the support and flexibility to achieve your professional and personal goals.
• Through skill-building, leadership development and philanthropic opportunities, we provide opportunities to build communities and grow your career, surrounded by diverse colleagues with high ethical standards.
• As part of Guardian’s Purpose – to inspire well-being – we are committed to offering contemporary, supportive, flexible, and inclusive benefits and resources to our colleagues.
• Explore our company benefits at www.guardianlife.com/careers/corporate/benefits.
• Benefits apply to full-time eligible employees.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees