Technology Manager

University of Washington•Seattle, WA

3d•$109,920 - $166,752•Hybrid

About The Position

Position Purpose: As a UW employee, you have a unique opportunity to change lives on our campuses, in our state and around the world. UW employees offer their boundless energy, creative problem-solving skills, and dedication to building stronger minds and a healthier world. UW is Committed to attracting and retaining a diverse staff, your experiences, perspectives, and unique identities will be honored at the University of Washington. Together, our community strives to create and maintain working and learning environments that are inclusive, equitable, and welcoming. UW Information Technology (UW-IT) is the central IT organization for the University of Washington, collaborating with partners across the University community to advance teaching, learning, innovation, and discovery. UW-IT delivers critical IT services and support to all three campuses, UW medical centers, and global research operations. Innovation and discovery are at the heart of what UW-IT does and drive the work in advancing the University of Washington’s role and mission. The Infrastructure Division (INF) designs, implements and supports the essential IT infrastructure services and technologies that are indispensable to carrying out the University’s mission. They include the University’s wired and wireless networks, telecommunications services, computing and storage services, infrastructure tools, and service delivery platforms. The division is also a trusted partner, delivering expertise and critical IT infrastructure to the UW’s extended community and regional partners, including the UW Medicine system, the WA state K-20 Education Network, and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) and its high-speed research networks enabling regional and international connectivity. Among the division’s key goals are providing robust, reliable, secure, cost-effective, scalable, and accessible services. The Technology Manager is part of UW-ITs Infrastructure division leadership team, overseeing a team of technical engineers and participates in multiple complex projects conducted by the Productivity Platforms team. The position requires expertise in people management, project management, and strategic planning as well as an elevated level of technical acumen related to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace for Education productivity products. As an invested, compassionate team-player, this position is responsible for guiding and mentoring staff, ensuring their development, and navigating complex performance issues balancing individual needs with departmental goals. The Technology Manager directly impacts the mission of the University Campus along with UW Medicine by balancing project and service management diverse priorities, from resource allocation to service quality and continuous improvement. This role needs effective communication skills to engage enterprise-wide stakeholders, analyze trends, and translate business and technical requirements into implementation plans. Additionally, the TM leads a team performing engineering and administrative functions for these platforms, including system configuration and lifecycle management; deployment of upgrades, patches, and enhancements; development and maintenance of technical documentation and standard operating procedures; proactive monitoring of system health, performance, and security; and delivery of Tier 3 support involving root-cause analysis, incident remediation, and coordination with vendors and cross-functional engineering teams. Additionally, the TM performs engineering administrative functions for these platforms, including system configuration and lifecycle management; deployment of upgrades, patches, and enhancements; development and maintenance of technical documentation and standard operating procedures; proactive monitoring of system health, performance, and security; and delivery of Tier 3 support involving root-cause analysis, incident remediation, and coordination with vendors and cross-functional engineering teams. The role provides senior leadership across a complex portfolio of platforms, balancing project delivery and service management priorities, including resource planning, service quality, and continuous improvement. It requires strong communication skills to engage enterprise stakeholders, evaluate operational and performance trends, and translate business and technical requirements into actionable implementation roadmaps. The TM leads and develops a multidisciplinary team responsible for engineering and operational functions across the platform lifecycle, including system configuration and lifecycle governance; planning and execution of upgrades, patches, and enhancements; establishment and maintenance of technical standards, documentation, and operating procedures; proactive monitoring of system health, performance, and security posture; and delivery of advanced (Tier 3) support encompassing root-cause analysis, incident resolution, and coordination with vendors and cross-functional engineering partners. Overall, this position demands the ability to navigate complex technical architectures and evolving requirements, balance competing operational, strategic, and stakeholder priorities, and provide clear technical and people leadership. The Technology Manager must translate business objectives into actionable technical plans, guide teams through ambiguity and risk, make informed trade-offs, and ensure the reliable delivery of scalable, secure, and maintainable solutions while fostering collaboration, accountability, and continuous improvement. Position Complexities: The Productivity Platforms Technology Manager plays a critical role within the Computing and Productivity Platforms (CPP) business unit shaping the future of UW Campus operations. The TM must have broad technical knowledge, business acumen, and the ability to build relationships across diverse disciplines and levels. This position provides technical leadership for the development of Microsoft and Google technology capabilities and related IT services that impact the mission, reputation, operations, and effectiveness of the entire university, including all UW branches and the medical centers. UW is typically an early adopter of new Microsoft and Google productivity applications; as a result, the Productivity Platforms team implements and supports these platforms in partnership with the vendor. This means that the team must creatively and collaboratively solve technical problems by collaborating closely with vendor engineers, partners in industry, engineers at other higher ed institutions who are also early adopters, and with engineers in UW-IT. This innovative work is challenging because once the new platforms are in place, the team must then provide Tier 3 support for technologists across campus who are responsible for implementing the new platforms in their colleges, schools, or departments. The TM brings deep subject-matter expertise and senior engineering leadership across Microsoft and Google platforms, leveraging this expertise to shape service strategy, platform governance, and long-term technology direction. This role translates advanced technical knowledge into clear strategic guidance, informed decision-making, and the ongoing professional development and mentorship of team members, ensuring engineering excellence, operational maturity, and alignment with enterprise objectives. Their expertise in people, projects, service, and operations management is instrumental in driving the success of the strategic roadmap. They play a vital role in ensuring scalable, secure, and efficient operations of Microsoft and Google technologies. Their contributions will directly influence how UW enterprise-wide stakeholders from UW Campus and UW Medicine leverages these technologies to empower faculty, staff, and students across all campuses, departments, administration, research, and UW Medicine. They bring a blend of technical skills and leadership ability, with the communication, business and technical acumen, and teamwork skills to analyze and amplify those voices, both within the team and across the University. Position Dimensions and Impact to the University: This position provides leadership for the development of Microsoft and Google technology capabilities and related IT services that impact the mission, reputation, operations, and effectiveness of the entire university, including all UW branches and the medical centers. Currently, Microsoft 365 is the primary email and calendaring service for the entire UW community, including UW Medicine. Teams and SharePoint Online are integral to academic and administrative workflows and will become increasingly more so especially with Teams Voice becoming a softphone option for the UW. TM’s primary responsibility is to ensure that this core, mission-critical platform is available 24 x 7 x 365. Microsoft 365 is HIPAA compliant, meaning clinicians, doctors, and other health-care staff can have "protected health information" about patients on this platform. The TM plays a significant role in UW-IT's efforts to offer and integrate the productivity platforms and services from Microsoft and Google. These productivity platform services serve more than 120,000 UW faculty, staff, and students and are key to bringing new productivity applications to enhance teaching, learning, research, and everyday work at UW. A substantial part of the UW community uses Google Workspace for Education to create and share documents, files, and data. TM has broad responsibility for identifying and releasing new Google Workspace capabilities while ensuring that the team can adequately support them. To promote research usage of Google Cloud Platform, the TM must work closely with the Research Computing division within UW-IT. This position also has a positive impact on major university initiatives involving the student learning experience, cloud services, cost containment, administrative system use, research administration, organizational effectiveness initiatives, targeted communications, and online collaboration/innovation. Similarly, the consequences of errors can lead to high-severity operational and security incidents, with potential widespread loss of productivity, as well as large financial and reputational risks. The position involves direct interaction with key sponsors and stakeholders at all levels of the university from students, faculty, and administration leadership and spans all major subject areas of the university. The position will represent UW-IT as the service owner in Microsoft and Google productivity and collaboration technologies, with extensive latitude for independent judgment. This position also helps to coordinate multiple subject matter experts in Microsoft and Google technologies to ensure sustainable solutions for the university. Therefore, this position can positively influence and impact critical programs, operations, systems, major work groups, and multiple functional areas simultaneously. This position provides leadership in UW-IT, Infrastructure division, of the Microsoft Productivity Platforms team, by collaborating strategically with other leaders to negotiate resources and priorities and to participate in planning of work. Additionally, TM will choose direction, technologies, methods, and strategies for the productivity platforms and serve as lead productivity platform engineer. This position must also exhibit excellent situational awareness in working with other UW-IT divisions and UW to develop and maintain effective communications and collaborative working relationships across all levels of the University. TM position will lead projects and a service team to deliver on the University’s IT strategy while directing technical staff. In this capacity, this individual must be able to organize and effectively influence individuals both directly and indirectly. This position provides functional and administrative oversight of technology professionals. Indirectly supervises staff from other teams when leading cross-unit projects and service efforts. Perform annual performance reviews that include professional development planning, areas for improvement, and goals. Interview, hire, onboard, and coach staff. Facilitate work schedules, leave requests, and on-call schedules. Hold people accountable, recommend and follow through with disciplinary actions, when necessary. Continuously improve, document, and update the team with new processes and guidelines.

Requirements

Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering, Science, or Business or discipline-related field or experience.
Minimum 4 or more years experience managing multidisciplinary information technology teams.
Experience delivering large scale solutions and support for IT systems in an education environment.
Experience administering Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft 365, and Google Workspace for Education.
Experience in creating and maintaining provisioning and systems management automation using PowerShell, Microsoft Graph API, and/or Google API.
Experience in creating and maintaining Microsoft SharePoint systems.
Experience using and supporting Microsoft Office and Google products and services.
A working knowledge of network and desktop application troubleshooting.
Demonstrated ability self-train on new products, protocols, standards and applications and the ability to communicate impacts and procedures to customers and support staff.
Working understanding of Microsoft Entra ID.
Demonstrated experience managing complex technical services involving multiple organizations and external service providers.
Proven consultation skills for executive leadership, support teams, project managers, and other technical staff.
Experience in resource allocation, project planning, and budget management.
Demonstrated knowledge of the ITIL framework and experience working in an ITIL environment.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills for clear and concise technical documentation, reporting, and presentations.
Strong customer focus, understanding user needs, and ensuring high service availability and support including the ability to speak about highly technical topics to non-technical audiences.
Strong analytical and critical thinking skills.
High degree of emotional intelligence for effective leadership, collaboration, and conflict resolution.

Nice To Haves

Experience in a research university or other academic institution.
Experience administering cloud computing infrastructure using Azure and/or Google Cloud Platform.
Knowledge of project management "best practices", group dynamics, team building and facilitation skills.
Experience designing, deploying, and managing solutions using Windows, Active Directory, SQL, SharePoint, Exchange, and Azure cloud-based products.
Proven history of hiring, mentoring, and advancing technical staff development and career growth and succession planning.
Experience with vendor/contract management.
ITIL Foundations certification.
Dev/Ops practices familiarity.
Understanding of Infrastructure/Platform-as-a-Service solutions, such as Microsoft Azure.
Oversight of phases of the software development lifecycle.
Demonstrated program management skills, including ability to maintain calm under pressure, comfort with ambiguity, ability to earn trust, ability to motivate others, and ability to engage in difficult conversations gracefully.
Knowledge of IT accessibility issues for users with disabilities; familiarity with accessibility standards and best practices; experience testing for accessibility; and demonstrated ability to design content/applications with accessibility considerations.

Responsibilities

(40%) Provide leadership and strategy of Microsoft365 and Google Workspace for Education Services, including: ● Service Operations & Direction ○ Oversee and set strategic and tactical direction for Microsoft365 and Google Workspace services. ○ Define and prioritize initiatives and projects, escalate challenges, and manage resources. ○ Align service designs and technical architecture with UW-IT’s enterprise standards. ● Expert Advice & Policy ○ Provide expert advice to technical staff, system owners, service managers, project teams, vendors, and customers. ○ Establish and maintain service and technical policies, standards, and procedures. ● Service Reliability & Support ○ Ensure reliable and timely operations, including incident management, problem resolution, and end-user technical support. ○ Maintain compliance with institutional and departmental policies and regulations. ○ Ensure service continuity guidelines and standards are in place. ● Communication & Reporting ○ Develop and implement communication plans to promote service capabilities and improvements. ○ Create and maintain reports on service usage, performance metrics, errors, and enhancement requests. ● Customer Engagement & Feedback ○ Develop customer engagement practices and analyze feedback to prioritize service improvements. ● Project & Continuous Improvement ○ Organize and manage projects for service development and enhancement. ○ Track deliverables, timelines, scope, budget, and risks. ○ Communicate with stakeholders to gather requirements and feedback. ● Strategic Advice & Team Coordination ○ Research industry trends and recommend technical/service improvements. ○ Plan teamwork and release cycles, present strategic opportunities, and lead retrospectives. ○ Advice on future skill needs and employee development.
(30%) Provide technical leadership Productivity Platforms: Lead Design & Support o Oversee and directly participate in the design, development, testing, implementation, maintenance, and Tier 3 support for productivity platforms and related technologies. Financial Oversight o Assist the unit Director in analyzing cost effectiveness and exercising cost controls for the team. Compliance & Reliability o Ensure technical compliance with regulations for data security, privacy, and accessibility. o Define service levels and oversee operations to maintain reliable systems. Operational Excellence o Drive operational excellence and high-quality service management, aligning with the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework. o Maintain focus on high customer satisfaction with productivity services. Performance Monitoring o Establish key performance metrics to monitor and track service efficiency and effectiveness. o Oversee monitoring, auditing, and performance of productivity platform solutions.
30% Workforce Manager ● Supervise & Develop Staff: ○ Function as the primary supervisor for technical engineering professionals. ○ Gather feedback on staff performance and conduct regular evaluations. ○ Guide and mentor employees, supporting their skill development and career growth. ○ Advocate for staff recognition and retention. ● Performance & Staffing: ○ Manage and resolve complex performance issues in collaboration with leadership and HR. ○ Analyze skill sets and plan for current and future technological needs. ○ Lead recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and orientation for new staff. ○ Ensure comprehensive onboarding and ongoing training for all team members. ● Resource & Project Management: ○ Balance organizational demands and available resources for projects and services. ○ Broker between project/service teams and individual employees to align work with priorities. ○ Coordinate with clients and stakeholders to determine technical requirements and resource needs. ○ Negotiate resources and apply best practices for service and software design. ● Continuous Improvement: ○ Seek opportunities for functional and process improvement. ○ Lead projects that support technology improvements. ○ Continuously update team documentation and guidelines. ● Team Leadership: ○ Keep team members on task and monitor progress. ○ Facilitate work schedules, leave requests, and on-call schedules. ○ Hold staff accountable and follow through with disciplinary actions when necessary.