Senior Director, IT Service Operations

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals • New York, NY

11h • Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Director, IT Service Operations owns the ASPCA IT Service Operations pillar, including Technical Support, Networks, Asset and Fleet Management, Account Management and identity provisioning, and Service Delivery. This is a people-leadership and operational-management role—not a technical architect or engineer position. The role establishes standards, evaluates work against them, and builds the operating model that enables managers and engineers to work effectively with fewer escalations. Success is measured by team performance, cohesion and growth, as well as the maturity of the practices the team operates.

The ASPCA is the nation's largest humane society and one of the world's leading animal welfare organizations. Its Information Technology division supports approximately 1,400 employees across New York City headquarters, shelters, clinics, mobile rescue units and field operations nationwide. The pillar is in active growth, and this role will establish practices where none exist, retire entrenched workarounds, and guide the shift to structured, repeatable operations through coaching and collaboration.

The Senior Director reports directly to the VP, Technology Services, leads 4–6 direct and matrixed reports and approximately 15 indirect reports, and serves as the operational deputy to the VP. The role may act with delegated authority during the VP's absence and, at the VP's direction, make decisions on matters extending across the division.

This is a hybrid position requiring at least two days per week on-site at an ASPCA New York City area location, with travel to ASPCA sites as needed, up to 15% annually. Travel may involve animals and standard shelter or clinic conditions. The role participates in off-hours escalation, major incident bridges and the after-hours escalation rotation shared with IT Leadership. Occasional lifting and carrying of IT equipment up to 25 lbs. is required during site visits and deployments.

The expected hiring salary range is $188,000–$200,000 annually. A cover letter is optional but strongly encouraged.

Requirements

• Strong people leadership skills, including the ability to manage managers or senior individual contributors across multiple sites and time zones.
• Familiarity with chairing a change advisory board and driving adoption among teams accustomed to informal practices.
• Strong systems thinking and ability to trace recurring incidents and service failures to structural, organizational and process root causes.
• Demonstrated commitment to animal welfare or a comparable mission, with sound judgment in weighing technology decisions against mission impact.
• Ability to turn broad or ambiguous transformation goals into practical implementation steps and clarify unclear objectives rather than waiting for direction.
• Ability to establish standards where none exist, make reversible decisions quickly and approach irreversible decisions carefully.
• Ability to anticipate interdependencies, consequences and risks across teams and departments.
• Ability to identify and remove process, system and practice roadblocks and to challenge conventional thinking.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain the what, why and how to program, security and finance stakeholders without shared technical vocabulary.
• Ability to adapt communication to the audience while maintaining the message, and to coach others toward root causes through discovery rather than directive answers.
• Accountability for pillar performance, results and budget, including communicating trade-offs in resource decisions.
• Ability to support teams through sustained transformation and build adoption through coaching rather than mandate.
• Must be available for off-hours escalation and major incident participation.
• Ability to exemplify ASPCA core values and behavioral competencies.
• Measurable ITIL or ITSM maturity gains delivered in a prior role.
• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Business Administration or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience.
• At least 6 years of progressive IT operations experience.
• At least 2 years managing managers or senior individual contributors within a formal team-lead structure.
• Experience establishing ITSM practices where none previously existed, or maturing informal ITSM practices into documented, repeatable and measured operations.
• Ability and willingness to attain ITIL Foundation (Version 5) certification within 6 months of starting.
• Proficiency making effective use of AI-assisted tools and validating their output with sound engineering judgment.
• English language proficiency is required.
• Ability to occasionally lift and carry up to 25 lbs. to move IT equipment during site visits and deployments.

Nice To Haves

• Proficiency with an ITSM platform such as FreshService or equivalent, including service catalog design, knowledge article standards, assignment group configuration and reporting.
• Platform credibility at a depth sufficient to set standards and evaluate engineers' work in at least three of the following: enterprise application administration such as Microsoft 365, Box or Okta; 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 or certifications.
• 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.
• Experience overseeing outsourced managed service provider, NOC, SOC or support engagements, including SLA governance.
• Experience with asset and configuration management, including establishing an authoritative system of record.
• Experience implementing IT Operations components of CIS Controls or an equivalent framework such as SOC 2 Type 2 or ISO/IEC 27001.
• Experience establishing or maturing ITSM practices and remaining at the organization to operate those practices for at least two years.
• Experience building portions of a compliance program or leading a first-time implementation or post-failure mediation.
• Experience in a nonprofit, healthcare or other mission-driven, multi-site operating environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of 4–6 employees by setting clear expectations, providing learning and development opportunities, building trusting relationships, and conducting feedback, career, performance evaluation and check-in conversations.
• Translate the VP's strategy into documented team goals and measurable quarterly deliverables, and review progress on a published cadence.
• Maintain cross-training and succession plans to eliminate single points of failure across Technical Support, Networks, Asset Management and Account Management.
• Develop strategic planning capability in senior individual contributors so functional experts can own roadmaps and standards.
• Recruit and onboard staff for open positions in the pillar in partnership with Talent Acquisition; serve as the primary escalation path for functional managers; and partner with the VP and People Team on performance management.
• Own the daily and weekly operating rhythm across 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 continuity and site-specific coverage.
• Own on-call rotation coverage and sustainability, monitoring workload distribution and rotation health.
• Serve as operational deputy to the VP, Technology Services, exercising delegated authority during the VP's absence and handling cross-pillar escalations and time-sensitive decisions as directed.
• Own scheduled disaster recovery and service continuity testing for pillar services, document results and track remediation.
• Lead major incident response, including bridge ownership, stakeholder communications, root-cause-analysis coordination and post-incident reviews; participate in the after-hours escalation rotation.
• Maintain the pillar's resource allocation model and identify demand-versus-capacity gaps before they cause delivery failures.
• Own outcomes of network engineering strategy across ASPCA locations; set the multi-site network roadmap and resilience standards, including ISP redundancy and carrier diversity; and negotiate framework decisions with stakeholders.
• Partner with the Senior Network Engineer on network delivery and strategy formation while developing that individual's strategic planning capability.
• Own the pillar's ITIL practices for Incident, Problem, Change Enablement, Service Request and Knowledge Management; publish and enforce standards for severity classification, escalation paths, SLA and OLA definitions, and major incident runbooks.
• Advance the pillar from informal practices to documented, repeatable and measured operations.
• Define and publish the pillar's performance measurement system, build FreshService reporting infrastructure, and report results in quarterly operational reviews with the VP and functional managers.
• Chair the Change Advisory Board and enforce change-management standards, including an exception path for emergency changes.
• Own Problem Management and the Known Error Database, requiring documented remediation or formally accepted risk before problem records are closed.
• Lead support-scale transformation through knowledge management, self-service, and onboarding and offboarding service design, measured against published deflection and time-to-productive targets.
• Own FreshService governance, including service catalog structure, knowledge article standards, assignment group configuration and reporting dashboards, partnering with the Senior Manager, Technical Services as platform owner.
• Own the runbook program by defining standards, assigning ownership to functional engineers and tracking completion against quarterly targets.
• Define and implement joiner-mover-leaver operational SLAs and track and report mean time to revoke access.
• Own role-based access control design and rollout across services in the pillar, and serve as its operational lead in the enterprise identity and access management program in partnership with identity provisioning and security teams.
• Own the complete asset lifecycle from procurement and provisioning through refresh and secure disposal; establish an authoritative system of record for IT asset and configuration data and retire shadow inventories.
• Own the pillar's operating budget, track spend, forecast hardware refreshes and license true-ups, and collaborate with program and department leaders on service-consumption forecasts.
• 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 for 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 Information Security on access reviews, endpoint compliance baselines, privileged deprovisioning and evidence collection for security control frameworks, including CIS Controls IG1.
• Build feedback loops among support, infrastructure and endpoint teams to identify systemic issues before they become incidents.
• Represent the IT Service Operations pillar in cross-functional forums with peer IT pillars and program stakeholders.
• Oversee day-to-day operational accountability for managed service provider, SOC and NOC engagements, including SLA compliance reviews, escalation handling and monthly service reviews.
• Serve as operational liaison to the identity and access management implementation partner and ensure deliverables are actioned within the pillar.
• Raise vendor contract performance deviations with the VP before renegotiation or formal escalation is required.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Benefits

• Affordable health coverage, including medical, employer-paid dental and optional vision coverage.
• Flexible time off, including vacation, paid personal time, sick time, bereavement time, paid parental leave and 10 company-paid holidays.
• 401(k) plan with dollar-for-dollar employer matching up to 4%, plus an additional 4% employer contribution each year.
• Professional development opportunities, including classes, on-the-job training, coaching, mentorship, internal mobility and opportunities to support work in the field.

What This Job Offers

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