Senior Director, IT Service Operations

ASPCA • New York, NY

1d • $188,000 - $200,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Director, IT Service Operations owns the IT Service Operations pillar: Technical Support, Networks, Asset and Fleet Management, Account Management and identity provisioning, and Service Delivery. This role is the operational command layer that translates strategy into daily execution, holds the pillar accountable to published standards, and builds the operating model that lets managers manage and engineers engineer without constant escalation. This is a people leadership and operational management role, not a technical architect or engineer role. You will set the standards, evaluate work against them, and hold engineers accountable to them. Success is measured by the performance, cohesion, and growth of the team, and by the maturity of the practices the team runs.

The ASPCA is the nation's largest humane society and one of the world's leading animal welfare organizations. Our mission is to provide effective means for the prevention of cruelty to animals throughout the United States. The Information Technology division supports approximately 1,400 employees across New York City headquarters, shelters, clinics, mobile rescue units, and field operations nationwide.

This is an opportunity to lead a transformation as the pillar is in active growth and we are looking for someone to establish practices where none exist, retire workarounds that have become load-bearing, and shepherd a shift toward structured, repeatable operations through coaching and collaboration rather than mandate. The candidate who will thrive here wants to build, is energized by ambiguity and challenge, and is driven by our mission.

Requirements

• Strong people leader, able to manage managers or senior individual contributors across multiple sites, including remote workers in various time zones
• Familiarity with chairing a change advisory board and driving adoption across teams accustomed to working informally
• Strong systems thinking, tracing recurring incidents and service failures to structural root causes, including organizational and process causes, rather than treating symptoms
• Proficiency with an ITSM platform such as FreshService or equivalent, including service catalog design, knowledge article standards, assignment group configuration, and reporting preferred
• Proficiency making effective use of AI-assisted tools, validating output with sound engineering judgment
• Demonstrated commitment to animal welfare, or to a comparable mission, and the judgment to weigh technology decisions against mission impact rather than technical elegance alone
• Creates specific and practical implementation steps from broad or ambiguous transformational goals, and clarifies situations where instructions or objectives are unclear rather than waiting for direction
• Establishes the standard where none exists rather than escalating for permission, moving quickly on reversible decisions and carefully on irreversible ones
• Uses a systems approach to think through interdependencies, anticipating consequences and risks across teams and departments before deciding
• Roots out roadblocks in processes, systems, or practices that inhibit responsiveness, and challenges conventional thinking rather than routing around it
• Crafts messages that convey the what, why, and how, driving alignment across program, security, and finance stakeholders who do not share a technical vocabulary
• Recognizes the potential impact of own words and actions due to title or status, and adjusts approach for the audience without changing the message
• Frames problems so that others can reach root cause themselves, using coaching and discovery rather than directive answers
• Accepts a high level of accountability for the pillar's performance, results, and budget, and communicates trade-offs on resource decisions rather than absorbing them silently
• Recognizes the human element of processing change, and helps the team find durable footing during sustained transformation
• Distinguishes legitimate objection from resistance to change, and builds adoption through coaching rather than mandate
• Must be available for off-hours escalation and major incident
• Ability to exemplify ASPCA's core values and behavioral competencies
• Measurable ITIL or ITSM maturity gains delivered in a prior role required
• Must be able to occasionally lift and carry up to 25 lbs. to move IT equipment during site visits and deployments
• English (required)
• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Business Administration, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience required
• 6+ years of progressive IT operations experience required
• 2+ years managing managers or senior individual contributors within a formal team-lead structure required
• Experience establishing ITSM practices where none previously existed, or maturing informal ITSM practice into documented, repeatable, and measured operations required; remaining at the organization to operate these practices for at least two years preferred
• Ability and willingness to attain ITIL Foundation (Version 5) Certification within 6 months of start required.

Nice To Haves

• Platform credibility in at least three of the following at a depth sufficient to set the standard and evaluate engineers' work (Preferred): enterprise application administration (such as Microsoft 365, Box, Okta or equivalents); role-based access control design; Zero Touch imaging and Autopilot provisioning; Intune (or equivalent) and mobile device management strategy and execution; enterprise change management; endpoint configuration and compliance baselines
• Advanced ITIL modules/certifications preferred
• Experience managing multi-site or geographically distributed technical operations serving frontline staff in field, clinical, or shared-device environments, including on-call and major incident coverage models preferred
• Experience overseeing outsourced managed service provider, NOC, SOC, or support engagements including SLA governance preferred
• Experience with asset and configuration management practice, including establishing an authoritative system of record preferred
• Experience implementing IT Operations components of CIS Controls or an equivalent such as SOC 2 Type 2 or ISO/IEC 27001 preferred
• ITIL Foundation (Version 5) Certification, or actively pursuing certification, preferred.
• Experience building portions of a compliance program or leading a first-time implementation or post-failure mediation a plus
• Experience in a nonprofit, healthcare, or other mission-driven multi-site operating environment preferred

Responsibilities

• Manage a team of 4-6 employees to succeed in their role by communicating clear expectations, providing opportunities for learning and development and building positive and trusting relationships.
• Support your direct reports by holding regular effective feedback conversations, career conversations, annual performance evaluations and ongoing check-in conversations with each team member on a cadence that's appropriate for their role(s).
• Translate the VP's strategy into documented team-level goals and measurable quarterly deliverables for each function in the pillar, and review progress against them on a published cadence.
• Produce and maintain cross-training and succession coverage plans that eliminate single points of failure across Technical Support, Networks, Asset Management, and Account Management.
• Develop strategic planning capability in senior individual contributors, creating pathways for functional experts to own roadmaps and standards rather than only deliverables.
• Own recruitment and onboarding for open positions within the pillar, partnering with Talent Acquisition to close gaps that constrain service coverage.
• Serve as the primary escalation path for functional managers, resolving complexity and assigning resources so that the need for escalation is a rarity.
• Partner with the VP and People Team on performance management, including documentation and follow-through.
• Own the daily and weekly operating rhythm across all supported locations, including standups, incident triage, change windows, and escalation management.
• Oversee multi-site technical operations across New York City, Ohio, Florida, Los Angeles, Illinois, North Carolina, and other field locations, ensuring service continuity and site-specific coverage plans.
• Own on-call rotation coverage and its long-term sustainability, monitoring load distribution and rotation health as a leading indicator of team wellbeing.
• Serve as the operational deputy to the VP, Technology Services, stepping in with delegated authority during the VP's absence and at the VP's direction on matters that extend across the division, including cross-pillar escalations and time-sensitive decisions that cannot wait for the VP's return.
• Own scheduled disaster recovery and service continuity testing for services within the pillar, and document results and remediation.
• Lead major incident response including bridge ownership, stakeholder communication, root cause analysis coordination, and post-incident review facilitation.
• Share the after-hours major incident escalation rotation with IT Leadership.
• Maintain the pillar's resource allocation model and surface demand versus capacity gaps before they become delivery failures.
• Own the outcomes of network engineering strategy across all ASPCA locations. Set the multi-site network roadmap, hold architecture and resilience standards including ISP redundancy and carrier diversity, and negotiate framework decisions with departmental stakeholders to reach the best organizational outcome rather than the fastest local one.
• Partner with the Sr. Network Engineer as the operational owner of network delivery, incorporating site-level operating expertise into strategy formation while developing their strategic planning capability toward broader ownership over time.
• Own the ITIL practice set for the pillar covering Incident, Problem, Change Enablement, Service Request, and Knowledge Management. Publish and enforce the operating standards for each, including severity classification, escalation paths, SLA and OLA definitions, and major incident runbooks, and advance the pillar from informal practice to documented, repeatable, and measured operations.
• Define and publish the pillar's performance measurement system. Select the metric set, build the FreshService reporting infrastructure that produces it, and report results in quarterly operational reviews with the VP and functional managers.
• Chair the existing Change Advisory Board and hold teams accountable to change management standards, including a defined exception path for emergency change.
• Own the Problem Management practice and the Known Error Database, ensuring problem records close only with documented remediation or formally accepted risk.
• Own support scale transformation as a practice under ITSM services, covering knowledge management, self-service, and onboarding and offboarding service design, measured against published deflection and time-to-productive targets.
• Own the FreshService governance model including service catalog structure, knowledge article standards, assignment group configuration, and reporting dashboards, partnering with the Sr. Manager, Technical Services as platform owner.
• Own the runbook program: define the standard, assign ownership to functional engineers, and track completion against quarterly targets.
• Define and implement the joiner-mover-leaver operational SLA and establish mean time to revoke access as a tracked and reported metric.
• Own role-based access control design and rollout across services within the pillar.
• Serve as the pillar's operational lead in the enterprise identity and access management program, partnering with the identity provisioning function and the security team.
• Own asset life cycle end to end, from procurement and provisioning through refresh and secure disposal.
• Establish and maintain the authoritative system of record for IT asset and configuration data, retiring shadow inventories in favor of a single source of truth.
• Own the pillar's operating budget, tracking spend, forecasting hardware refresh and license true-ups, and partnering with program and department leaders on forecasts for the services their teams consume.
• Own the pillar's standards library including configuration baselines, endpoint compliance targets, and operational runbooks.
• Serve as matrixed co-owner of Enterprise Application Management governance covering Box, Microsoft 365, and Okta administration standards, partnering with the Cloud Architect and Information Security Analyst until a dedicated Enterprise Applications Administrator is in place.
• Partner with the Information Security function on access reviews, endpoint compliance baselines, privileged deprovisioning execution, and evidence collection for security control frameworks including CIS Controls IG1.
• Build feedback loops between support, infrastructure, and endpoint teams to surface systemic issues before they become incidents.
• Represent the IT Service Operations pillar in cross-functional forums with peer IT pillars and program stakeholders.
• Own day-to-day operational accountability for the managed service provider, SOC, and NOC engagement, covering SLA compliance review, escalation handling, and monthly service reviews.
• Serve as operational liaison to the identity and access management implementation partner, ensuring deliverables are actioned within the pillar.
• Surface vendor contract performance deviations to the VP before they require renegotiation or formal escalation.
• Other duties as assigned.

Benefits

• Affordable health coverage, including medical, employer-paid dental and optional vision coverage.
• Flexible time off that includes vacation time, paid personal time, sick time, bereavement time, paid parental leave, and 10 company paid holidays that allows you even more flexibility to observe the days that mean the most to you.
• Competitive financial incentives and retirement savings, including a 401(k) plan with generous employer contributions — we match dollar-for-dollar up to 4% and provide an additional 4% contribution toward your future each year.
• Robust professional development opportunities including classes, on-the-job training, coaching and mentorship with industry-leading peers, internal mobility, opportunities to support in the field and so much more.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director