Senior Manager, Strategy & Innovation

Artivion, Inc.•Kennesaw, GA

5h•Hybrid

About The Position

We are seeking a Senior Manager of Infrastructure Operations & Strategy to provide operational, technical, and people leadership for enterprise infrastructure operations, engineering, and platform services across servers, storage platforms, cloud connectivity, data center services, monitoring, service restoration, and related resilience capabilities. The role translates enterprise technology direction into infrastructure roadmaps, standards, investment priorities, modernization plans, and measurable operational outcomes while ensuring appropriate risk, compliance, and resilience controls are embedded into infrastructure architecture and operations. This role manages infrastructure operations, contributes to the infrastructure roadmap, supports service reliability objectives, capacity and lifecycle planning, operational support processes, vendor and partner performance, and financial stewardship for the infrastructure portfolio. The Senior Manager supports annual budgeting, forecasting, capital and operating expense planning, budget variance management, and cost optimization while aligning infrastructure investments with business priorities, risk tolerance, and enterprise technology strategy. The successful candidate is expected to lead engineers, operations teams, and cross-functional partners while remaining sufficiently technical to guide architecture decisions, coordinate high-severity incident response, and support senior leadership communication during critical events. The role balances strategy execution, operational excellence, financial discipline, governance, and measurable improvement in service availability, resiliency, performance, scalability, and modernization.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field or equivalent years of relevant work experience; Master's degree preferred.
10-15 years of progressive experience in infrastructure engineering, infrastructure operations, enterprise platforms, cloud, working knowledge of networking concepts related to systems, data center operations, or related technology leadership roles.
Minimum 4-6 years of people leadership experience, including leadership of senior engineers, operations teams, distributed teams, or vendor/managed service teams.
Demonstrated experience managing infrastructure budgets and spend, including capital and operating expense planning, forecasting, budget variance support, vendor spend, managed service costs, and cost optimization.
Proven track record building, scaling, modernizing, and operating infrastructure platforms and operations functions across on-premises, hybrid cloud, and cloud-connected environments.
Strong working knowledge of server platforms, virtualization, cloud compute, storage systems, backup/recovery, replication, routing, switching, firewalls, segmentation, SD-WAN, monitoring, observability, and core infrastructure services.
Demonstrated experience leading infrastructure operations, including incident management, problem management, change coordination, service restoration, operational readiness, runbook development, and continuous service improvement.
Ability to operate across tactical, operational, architectural, and strategic levels, with the technical depth to guide decisions during critical incidents and communicate effectively with leadership.
Strong experience with high availability, fault-tolerant design, performance optimization, capacity planning, disaster recovery architecture, and RTO/RPO ownership.
Experience contributing to infrastructure roadmaps, lifecycle plans, investment cases, operating metrics, service review forums, governance forums, and leadership reporting.
Experience managing vendor relationships, contracts, licensing, renewals, service-level commitments, procurement cycles, managed service performance, and operational escalation paths.
Ability to translate technical risk, service needs, operational gaps, and infrastructure debt into clear financial and business recommendations.
Demonstrated experience translating business and technology objectives into infrastructure strategy, roadmaps, architecture standards, lifecycle plans, and prioritized investments.
Working knowledge of risk, compliance, and infrastructure control requirements, including hardening, patching, identity and access control, vulnerability remediation, logging, monitoring, and encryption.
Demonstrated ability to lead high-severity outage, disaster recovery, cyber recovery, or major operational incident response activities, including technical coordination and leadership communication.

Nice To Haves

Infrastructure, cloud, networking, operations, or platform certifications preferred, such as VMware, AWS, Azure, Cisco, ITIL, storage platform, or related certifications.
Relevant architecture, strategy, program management, or service management credentials are helpful but not a primary requirement.

Responsibilities

Manage day-to-day infrastructure operations across server, virtualization, cloud, storage, backup, data center, and core platform services, including monitoring, incident response, change execution, service restoration, and escalation management.
Lead the design, implementation, modernization, and lifecycle management of physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure to meet availability, performance, scalability, recoverability, compliance, and supportability requirements.
Execute infrastructure strategy, standards, and roadmap priorities; prioritize initiatives based on business value, service reliability, risk reduction, technical debt, regulatory requirements, and total cost of ownership.
Maintain operational discipline through ITSM practices, operating metrics, SOPs, runbooks, knowledge management, post-incident reviews, and continuous service improvement.
Oversee platform configuration, patching, capacity, performance, observability, automation, and standardization across Windows, Linux, virtualization, cloud, storage, and backup environments.
Manage enterprise data protection capabilities, including SAN, NAS, object storage, backup, replication, immutable storage, and cloud storage, ensuring data durability, encryption, retention alignment, and recoverability.
Coordinate infrastructure readiness for new systems, acquisitions, integrations, site changes, manufacturing requirements, and major business or technology initiatives.
Assist with infrastructure financial planning, including annual operating and capital budgets, multi-year investment planning, forecasting, and budget variance management.
Manage assigned vendor spend, licensing, maintenance contracts, cloud consumption, hardware refresh cycles, managed services, and infrastructure project financials.
Partner with Finance, Procurement, Network, IT leadership, and business stakeholders to build business cases, track ROI, manage accruals, and support funding decisions.
Identify and execute cost optimization opportunities while preserving resilience, compliance, performance, and service quality.
Assist and guide infrastructure disaster recovery, cyber recovery, and business continuity capabilities from a platform, operations, and service-readiness perspective.
Ensure systems are recoverable within defined RTO/RPO targets and that recovery capabilities are tested, documented, operationalized, and continuously improved.
Coordinate recovery planning and senior leadership communication during high-severity outages, cyber events, operational disruptions, or resilience exercises.
Lead, coach, and develop infrastructure engineering and operations teams; establish goals, performance expectations, succession plans, and talent development plans.
Maintain clear operating rhythms for service reviews, operations reviews, roadmap governance, financial reviews, incident reviews, problem reviews, and leadership reporting.
Serve as a liaison between infrastructure operations, infrastructure engineering, cybersecurity, enterprise architecture, IT leadership, Finance, Procurement, business leaders, and external partners.
Communicate infrastructure service health, strategic priorities, operational risks, financial outlook, roadmap progress, and investment needs to IT and senior leadership.