VP, Technical Engineering

Opensity Solutions•Opensity Chicago, IL

About The Position

Opensity Solutions is seeking a Vice President of Technical Engineering to lead the technical engine of the business. Reporting to the Executive Vice President, this is the senior-most technical leadership role in the organization — accountable for how work is scoped, how it is delivered, and how the environments we build stay secure and supportable once they are live. The role spans multiple functions: engineering delivery, pre-sales solution architecture, infrastructure and network operations, the security organization, and datacenter strategy. Carrying all of them is deliberate. It means the person who commits to a scope is the same person accountable for delivering it, and the same person who inherits the environment afterward. The VP is expected to use that position to close the gap between what is sold and what is built. This is a hands-on executive role, in a specific sense. The VP does not write the designs, the standards, or the roadmaps — that work belongs to the architects and managers who own each domain. But the VP participates in the build process, challenges them, makes direct changes to them, and is accountable for them once they ship. Accepting what the team hands over and passing it along is not the job. The plan is ultimately the VP's plan.

Requirements

12+ years of progressive experience in IT infrastructure, network engineering, or technical consulting, including 5+ years leading engineering teams.
Demonstrated ownership of a delivery portfolio in a professional services or managed services environment, with accountability for both technical outcomes and margin.
Deep hands-on background in enterprise network and infrastructure engineering — routing and switching, firewalls and network security, virtualization, and cloud or hybrid architecture.
Proven pre-sales capability: scoping complex engagements, writing defensible SOWs and estimates, and presenting solutions credibly to executive buyers.
Working command of security operations practice — vulnerability management, patching discipline, incident response, and hardening standards.
Ability to bring deep specialists with genuinely different worldviews to a single plan. The CISSP and the CCIE will not agree; this role is expected to get them to one answer and make it stick.
Track record of building process where little existed, and getting engineers to actually adopt it.
Excellent written and verbal communication; able to move between a CIO conversation and a packet capture without losing either audience.
Bachelor's degree in a technical discipline, or equivalent professional experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading leaders, including a director-level direct report, rather than individual contributors alone.
Datacenter or colocation experience, including consolidation, migration, or facility exit planning.
Experience leading or overseeing a security practice or security organization.
Experience with ITSM platforms — ServiceNow in particular — and with monitoring and observability tooling.
Experience in a partner or channel model, including OEM relationship management.
P&L or cost-center ownership experience.
ITIL certification.

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end delivery accountability for the engineering portfolio — schedule, technical quality, margin, and client outcome.
Institutionalize a structured delivery lifecycle and the design standards that support it.
Establish and enforce engineering standards: design documentation, test and cutover plans, change control, rollback procedures, and as-built handover packages.
Partner with the PMO on project health reviews; identify at-risk engagements early and work with the architects to intervene with a concrete recovery plan rather than a status update.
Own resource planning and utilization for the solution architects and for the Director of Security.
Serve as the executive escalation point for delivery issues, and owns resolving technical issues when a project is genuinely off track.
Drive continuous improvement through post-engagement reviews, tracking recurring failure modes and fixing their root causes in process or training.
Partner with the solution architects to complete technical scoping and solution design for new opportunities, ensuring estimates reflect real effort, dependencies, and risk, and that bills of materials and technical proposal content are complete before anything is committed.
Partner with sales leadership as the senior technical voice in client and prospect conversations, from discovery through executive presentation.
Build and maintain reusable scoping models, reference architectures, and solution templates that reduce estimating variance and speed up proposal turnaround.
Act as trusted technical advisor to key accounts — providing vCIO services, leading architecture reviews, technology roadmap discussions, and modernization planning.
Maintain a disciplined qualification standard: recommend declining or restructuring opportunities that carry unacceptable technical or delivery risk.
Partner with the Vendor Management Office (VMO) on technical relationships, including certification requirements, partner tier obligations, and product roadmap alignment.
Approve and govern the architecture standards the architects author across System, Network, End User Compute, Document Management, and Security; arbitrate exceptions and deviations.
Work alongside the architects while those standards and roadmaps are being built — challenging assumptions and making direct changes — rather than reviewing finished deliverables after the fact.
Hold each architect accountable for the operational health of their domain and for the metrics that demonstrate it.
Approve the lifecycle and refresh roadmaps each domain produces, including end-of-life and end-of-support exposure.
Act as the final escalation point when a domain has exhausted its own path — the backstop that brings informed judgment to the problem.
Define the standards every domain is held to — documentation, design review, and handover among them — and build out the standards that do not exist yet.
Directly lead the Director of Security and the Security Architect function, setting objectives, priorities, and performance expectations for both.
Hold the Director of Security accountable for the security engineering team — its delivery quality, operational discipline, and day-to-day execution.
Establish the operating model between security architecture (standards and design) and security engineering (implementation and operations) so ownership is unambiguous at the boundary.
Review and approve the security organization's structure, staffing plan, and role definitions as the practice grows.
Resolve escalations and conflicts between security requirements and delivery timelines, making the risk-versus-schedule call and owning it.
Own the development plan for the security practice — skills coverage, certification roadmap, lab and tooling investment, and training priorities — built with the Director of Security rather than handed to them.
Coach the Director of Security as a leader, not only as a technologist; build their capacity to run, staff, and grow the team without escalation.
Develop the Security Architect into an advisor capable of leading executive-level risk and compliance conversations.
Build succession depth across the security function and remove single points of knowledge failure through documentation and cross-training.
Set the hiring bar for senior security talent and participate directly in those hiring decisions.
Engage the Manager Datacenter Operations to build and maintain the standards and capacity plan for Opensity's own datacenter and colocation footprint — power, cooling, cabinet and rack layout, and carrier and cross-connect strategy — and approve the result.
Drive the datacenter strategy — where Opensity holds footprint, where it consolidates, and where it exits — and own each of those decisions end to end, including the business case, the client transition plan, and the timeline the decision has to stand on.
Partner with the Manager Datacenter Operations to define what a modernized Opensity datacenter service looks like for clients whose workloads are staying in the datacenter — deciding together what changes, in what order, and what it gives those clients that a commodity provider cannot.
Build, structure, and develop the technical organization — hiring, leveling, career paths, and certification strategy.
Coach architects, security team members, and technical leads; grow the next layer of leadership rather than concentrating knowledge at the top.
Carry accountability for the technical services P&L, including budget, tooling, training, and contractor spend.
Reduce single-person dependencies through documentation, cross-training, and deliberate knowledge transfer.
Contribute to company strategy as a member of the leadership team, translating market and technology shifts into service offerings and capability investments.
Take on additional responsibilities and reporting relationships as the business requires.