Senior Manager of Research Storage & Data Infrastructure

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital•Memphis, TN

67d•$125,840 - $238,160

About The Position

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital is seeking an experienced, strategic leader to manage and advance its research storage ecosystem within Research Information Services (RIS). The Senior Manager leads the team responsible for scalable, secure, high-performance data infrastructure supporting biomedical research, analytics, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing. The position provides strategic and operational leadership for scientific computing storage, including active research storage, archival and object storage, cloud-integrated platforms, secure research environments, data protection, and disaster recovery. The role defines technology strategy, guides platform evolution, oversees major investments, and ensures operational excellence for systems that store and protect research assets. Working with Information Services teams, research programs, administrative leadership, and external collaborators, the Senior Manager advises on storage architecture, research computing operations, service quality, capacity planning, and technology roadmaps. The role also manages strategic vendor partnerships, including operational governance, architecture reviews, service delivery, procurement support, technology evaluation, and performance accountability. Infrastructure supports AI training and inference, HPC, genomics, imaging, scientific instrumentation, and other data-intensive workloads, with business continuity, backup, and disaster recovery capabilities.

Requirements

Bachelor's or Master's degree in business administration, computer science, data science, information science, or a related field.
At least 8 years of progressive IT experience, including experience managing small or mid-size teams; enterprise-scale storage infrastructure, research computing environments, or large-scale data platforms are preferred contexts.
Experience leading complex projects or delivery involving resources, vendors, and budgets.
Experience managing teams in a supervisory or leadership capacity; preferably at least 3 years leading technical teams or infrastructure operations.
Proven performance in an earlier or comparable role.

Nice To Haves

Experience managing storage technologies across on-premises, colocation, and/or cloud environments.
Experience working with storage vendors, managed service providers, or strategic technology partners.
Strong understanding of storage architecture, capacity planning, backup, replication, data protection, disaster recovery, business continuity, on-premises and cloud storage, and performance optimization.
Demonstrated success leading operational service delivery and infrastructure lifecycle management.
Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
Experience supporting HPC, AI, machine learning, scientific computing, or large-scale research environments.
Experience administering or supporting IBM Storage Scale (GPFS), Lustre, or comparable parallel file systems.
Familiarity with object storage platforms and S3-compatible architectures.
Experience designing and operating multi-tiered storage ecosystems spanning flash, disk, archive, cloud, and replication tiers.
Knowledge of using local NVMe resources, burst buffers, caching layers, or node-local storage to accelerate AI and HPC workloads.
Experience supporting genomics, imaging, microscopy, or other high-throughput research data pipelines.
Experience with storage benchmarking, observability platforms, telemetry, and capacity forecasting.
Knowledge of disaster recovery, business continuity, cyber resilience, and data protection frameworks.
Experience supporting GPU computing, distributed AI training, and large-scale analytics platforms.

Responsibilities

Develop and manage the roadmap for centralized research storage platforms, including high-performance file systems, object and archival storage, cloud-integrated storage, and secure research environments.
Lead architecture planning for growth in AI, machine learning, scientific computing, research instrumentation, and emerging research technologies.
Evaluate technology and vendor solutions to improve performance, resilience, scalability, user experience, and cost efficiency; support planning for increases in research data volume and complexity.
Ensure reliable research storage services for HPC, AI, regulated research environments, institutional applications, and data-intensive science.
Establish and monitor service-level objectives, operational metrics, capacity forecasts, and performance benchmarks.
Develop reporting and dashboards to support leadership decisions, budgeting, procurement, and lifecycle planning.
Lead incident management, root-cause analysis, change management, and continuous service improvement; document operational procedures and knowledge, and support centralized asset management and information security.
Manage storage vendor relationships, governance meetings, technical reviews, architecture planning, and service performance assessments.
Review equipment proposals, quotations, statements of work, and technology recommendations; define RACI models, escalation processes, and responsibilities across internal teams and service providers.
Partner with researchers, data stewards, and RIS leadership to align storage services with data management objectives; support governance, archival processes, retention strategies, and lifecycle management.
Collaborate with Information Security and compliance partners on controls for sensitive and regulated research data; promote stewardship, efficient resource use, and sustainable storage growth.
Develop and maintain storage-related disaster recovery and business continuity strategies, including resiliency, recoverability, backup, replication, immutable recovery, and cyber resilience capabilities.
Partner with Information Security, Technology Services, and RIS leadership to define recovery objectives, procedures, and operational response plans.
Lead disaster recovery testing and recovery validation exercises; maintain documentation for audits, business continuity, and disaster recovery requirements.
Identify and mitigate risks involving storage infrastructure, vendor dependencies, capacity constraints, and emerging technologies.
Lead, mentor, and develop storage engineers, infrastructure specialists, and trusted consultants; foster accountability, operational excellence, innovation, collaboration, and customer service.
Support hiring, performance management, career development, succession planning, and workforce growth; build partnerships across RIS, Technology Services, Information Security, Shared Resources, and the research community.