Infrastructure Engineering Manager II - Operations & Applications

Overview

The Infrastructure Services Manager II leads the delivery, operation, lifecycle management, and modernization of infrastructure platforms, operations, and enterprise application services. Depending on assignment, the manager leads either the Platforms or Applications & Operations team and ensures assigned systems and services are secure, reliable, resilient, recoverable, and aligned with organizational priorities.

In partnership with senior technology leadership, this leader develops and implements technology and service strategies, multiyear roadmaps, operating standards, and modernization plans for the assigned area. The manager translates business needs, technology risks, and organizational priorities into sustainable solutions and measurable outcomes. The role oversees service performance, upgrades and migrations, patching and vulnerability remediation, technical-debt reduction, disaster recovery readiness, audit and compliance coordination, vendor performance, resource planning, and assigned budgets.

Responsibilities

Cross Functional Leadership

• Forecasts future skill and competency needs to recruit, develop, and maintain an outstanding team.

• Acts as a trusted advisor and builds and maintains relationships with other UW Credit Union leaders and business executives to develop a clear understanding of business needs.

• Ensures cost-effective delivery of IT services to meet those needs and can respond with the agility required to address changing business priorities.

• Leverages influencing and negotiation skills across IT and the enterprise to enable cost- effective and innovative shared solutions in the achievement of business goals.

• Takes actions that directly or indirectly influence others to create buy-in, gain trust, and motivate actions in others or win concessions without damaging relationships.

IT Infrastructure Engineering

• Develops and maintains infrastructure technology and project roadmaps and resource forecasts that align and support overall business strategies.

• Understands business drivers and business capabilities (future and current state) and determines corresponding enterprise system designs and change requirements to drive the organization's targeted business outcomes.

• Stays current with emerging technology trends, disruptions, and the practical application of existing, new, and emerging technologies to enable new and evolving business and operating models.

• Analyzes and evaluates the infrastructure technology industry trends and determines their potential impact on the enterprise.

• Acts as a consultant on a broad range of technologies, platforms, and vendor offerings to drive targeted business outcomes.

• Translates business and technical requirements into an architectural plan to achieve business objectives and documents all solution architecture design and analysis work.

• Establishes network architecture design and implementation standards for (LAN, WAN, and VPN)

• Manages the development of server infrastructure architecture standards (physical, virtual, and cloud)

• Leads the planning and evaluation discussions for data storage, backup, and transfer needs (SAN, NAS.)

• Leads architecture discussions and evaluations including the design, and analysis for the implementation of solutions across a group of specific business applications or technologies based on enterprise business strategy, business capabilities, value-streams, business requirements and enterprise solution standards.

• Analyzes the business-IT environment (run, grow and transform the business) to detect critical deficiencies, legacy and technical debt, and recommends solutions for improvement (systems of record, differentiation and innovation).

• Designs and directs the governance activities associated with ensuring solutions security and compliance are maintained.

• Manages the evaluation and selection of hardware, software and platforms as needed, always utilizing a cloud-smart approach as options are considered.

• Leads the product lifecycle decisions to maintain, refresh or retire products, services or systems (including applications, technologies, processes and information).

• Develops and maintains a technology solution standard, clearly linking dependencies or impacts as they surface.

• Negotiates vendor pricing on products and services as the team looks to procure solutions.

• Manages and holds our vendors and business partners accountable for the delivery or product and services as outlined in any agreements made formal or informal.

• Develops and Manages to the approved Infrastructure Engineering budget for hardware, software, and staffing.

Operational Support & Service Coordination

• Manages all aspects of Data Center operations including design, configuration, support, and ensures optimization of operational costs.

• Ensuring adequate network, systems, and resource capacity to support operational needs, business grown plans, and changing workloads.

• Manages IT Infrastructure costs through efficient resource utilization (network, systems, vendor, and staff).

• Ensure our end user customers are consistently receiving outstanding service and are delighted with our handling and follow-up on the products and services we deliver.

• Develop metrics and data analytics to help illustrate our service and operational effectiveness to our internal end user, and external member customers.

• Maintain an appropriately sized/market leading tool set for monitoring and alerting team resources when outages or degraded service levels occur throughout the infrastructure.

• Implement optimization strategies to improve efficiency and performance.

• Serve as overall incident response manager overseeing and managing the team response during critical infrastructure outage situations, including pulling together a technical bridge; ensuring timely and accurate technical assistance is provided whenever the team needs to escalate a situation to a vendor for help; and, provide communication and updates to other senior IT leaders in regular/timely intervals so they can ensure key stakeholder/customers are kept abreast of progress and status of remediation or repair operations.

• Manage the IT ticketing system queue assigned to the Infrastructure Engineering team to ensure prompt and accurate ticket assignments are made and monitored for SLA and quality adherence and assurance.

• Coordinate scheduling of resources to ensure our hours of operational commitment to the company are maintained, including IT on-call coordination. Additionally, coordinate maintenance or installation activities during non-business hours as required.

• Provide senior-management level oversight in the development, and delivery of all infrastructure related organizational change management (OCM) solutions are consistently a priority and delivered with utmost excellence when introducing any new technology to our end user customers.

• Author and/or assist team in the creation of technology related business proposals where significant cost or business impact is involved for senior leader/executive consideration (costs, benefits, risks, desired outcomes).

• Ensure adequate data and software backups and redundancy to recover systems in agreed upon Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) timeframes.

Other Duties

• Lead the preparation and monitor the annual capital and expense budgets for the Infrastructure Engineering Team.

• Manage activities related to workload assignment, including maintenance of resource allocation estimates, project/task status, estimated and actual effort, target dates, and associated documentation.

• Partner with the Director of Infrastructure services to manage vendor relationships.

• Participate in new vendor evaluations, including contract negotiations as appropriate. Ensure active usage of vendor provided resources, including technical support, education, compliance, reporting, and user groups.

• Maintain professional rapport with vendor contacts to facilitate progress with problem resolution and new product enhancements.

Qualifications

Education & Experience:

• Bachelor’s Degree Information Systems, Computer Science, Data Science, Business or related field required or equivalent work experience. Master’s degree preferred.

• 8 - 9 years’ experience working on or leading an IT Infrastructure Engineering team required

• 4 - 5 years’ experience in a formal IT management or leadership role required.

• Experience in technology design, implementation, and support skills.

• Experience with infrastructure related process design/development

• Experience with Microsoft 365 related solutions.

• Experience with budget creation, forecasting and adherence.

• Experience with Network Infrastructure technologies, tools, and frameworks.

• Experience with vendor management, contract reviews, and service management.

• Experience with unified communications/collaboration and contact center solution engineering and support.

• Experience recruiting and retaining highly effective team members.

• Certified ITIL v3/v4 Foundation Framework.

• Experienced in the migration effort associated with moving infrastructure systems, applications, and storage from on-prem to the cloud.

Skills:

• Demonstrates professional maturity surrounding data access, data security, data sensitivity, and appropriate data use.

• Experience and familiarity with sophisticated and complex network infrastructures and security

• Expert level verbal and written communication skills.

• Should be confident, energetic self-starter, with strong moderation and communication skills.

• Should exhibit superior presentation skills, including storytelling and other techniques to guide and inspire.

• Expert interpersonal skills, ability to effectively collaborate with others and work as part of a team.

• Ability to initiate and follow through on complex projects of both short- and long-term durations.

• Expert organization and time management skills.

• Expert analytical, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills.

• Able to work independently, assumes responsibility for job development and training, researches and resolves questions and problems, requests leadership input and keeps leadership informed.

• Ability to train, coach and mentor direct reports.

• Must be able to embrace and encourage work in a diverse, collaborative team environment.

• Must be self-driven, curious, and creative.

• Demonstrated attention to detail.

• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple tasks and meet deadlines.

• Serve as an escalation point and be able to participate in a 24x7 on-call rotation to support key processes.

• Working knowledge of Microsoft Windows PC and Server OS, Active Directory, DHCP, and other core/similar infrastructure technologies.

• Working knowledge of data and voice networking, both on-prem and cloud virtualization/infrastructure platforms.

• Working knowledge of Microsoft Windows PC and Server OS, Active Directory, DHCP, and other core/similar infrastructure technologies.

Working at UW Credit Union

Why work for UW Credit Union?

Join one of Wisconsin’s premier financial institutions, a National Top Workplace and multi-year recipient of Madison Magazine’s Best Places to Work, Wisconsin State Journal’s Top Workplaces, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Top Workplaces to receive:

• 21.5+ days annual paid time off (4+ weeks)

• 2 weeks paid caregiver leave

• 2.5 weeks paid new child parental leave

• 2 days paid volunteer time

• 11 paid holidays (includes your birthday!)

• 401k company match of up to 5%, plus approximately 4% discretionary match

• Variable bonus reward

• Competitive Medical, Dental and Vision plans, including domestic partner eligibility

• Discounted bus pass and bublr membership

• Employee Assistance Program

• And more!

All employees must possess valid work authorization to work for UWCU on the date of hire. UWCU does not provide immigration sponsorship or support for employment authorization to include, but not limited to, sponsorship or support for H-1B, F-1 OPT, TN, or other visa category.