Director IT Operations

This position offers a hybrid work option up to 50% remote and is based out of the Mankato, MN; Lakeville, MN; Sun Prairie, WI or Bloomington, IL office location.

The contributions you will make:

This position is responsible for the strategic direction, operational excellence, and service delivery of enterprise BT operations with a focus on Client Service, Service Delivery, Service Reliability, and Service Management. The incumbent ensures that BT services are delivered reliably, efficiently, and in alignment with business needs and user experience expectations. Incorporating Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles, drives operational maturity, builds reliability and automation into BT operations, oversees incident, problem, and change management practices, and leads continuous improvement efforts to optimize service performance and customer satisfaction. Provides strong, values-based leadership, fosters a high-performing team culture, and ensures effective service management, execution of operational roadmaps, and alignment with enterprise outcomes.

A typical day:

Strategic Leadership and Execution.

• Translates enterprise and BT strategies into actionable BT operations, service reliability, and service delivery roadmaps.
• Leads the design and execution of BT service management (ITSM) and SRE frameworks to ensure operational stability, reliability, and resilience.
• Establishes and maintains reliability metrics (SLIs/SLOs) and integrates them into service management and business reporting.
• Ensures BT service delivery is customer-centric, cost-effective, and reliability-focused, emphasizing proactive issue prevention over reactive response.
• Evaluates and integrates emerging practices and technologies (e.g., AI-driven observability, automation, self-healing systems, predictive monitoring) that enhance user experience and operational efficiency.
• Partners with BT leadership, security, infrastructure, and application teams to ensure resilient service delivery capabilities that meet current and future business needs.
• Drives a culture of continuous improvement and reliability engineering across BT operations.

Team Leadership.

• Provides day-to-day leadership and coaching to service delivery, SRE, BT service desk, and ITSM process owners.
• Builds and sustains a collaborative, inclusive, and high-performing team culture aligned with organizational values.
• Develops team members through mentoring, training, and career development with a focus on SRE disciplines (monitoring, automation, incident response, capacity planning). * Promotes shared accountability between operations, SRE, and development teams for availability, latency, and performance outcomes.
• Creates succession and workforce planning strategies ensuring the right mix of IT operations, service delivery, and reliability engineering skills are in place to support evolving business needs.
• Fosters strong cross-functional partnerships across BT, business units, and vendor partners to ensure seamless, reliable service delivery.

BT Service Operations and Delivery.

• Oversees incident, problem, change, and request management processes to ensure efficient resolution and resilient service recovery.
• Implements proactive monitoring, observability, and error-budgetbased reliability practices to anticipate and prevent issues before they impact users.
• Establishes, monitors, and reports on SLAs, SLOs, and error budgets to drive service quality, availability, and customer satisfaction.
• Ensures effective service lifecycle management, including reliability reviews, service onboarding, catalog management, and decommissioning.
• Champions automation, runbook optimization, and post-incident learning to continuously reduce toil and improve mean time to recovery (MTTR).
• Supports disaster recovery, business continuity, and operational readiness for critical business services, integrating SRE-driven resilience testing where appropriate.

Budget and Vendor Management.

• Manages operational budgets for BT service delivery, aligning investments with business priorities, reliability goals, and cost optimization.
• Oversees vendor contracts, relationships, and performance for managed services, ITSM platforms, and service desk/SRE tooling providers.
• Identifies opportunities for efficiency, automation, and innovation through vendor partnerships and technology investments.
• Evaluates third-party performance based on reliability and observability capabilities, not just cost or responsiveness.

The skills and experience we prefer you have:

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Business, or related field; or equivalent combination of education and experience sufficient to perform the essential functions of the job.
• Minimum of 10 years of BT experience, with at least 5 years in BT operations, site reliability engineering, service management, or customer service leadership roles in a mid-to-large enterprise.
• Minimum five years of proven experience leading cross-functional BT service delivery and reliability transformation initiatives.
• Exceptional people leadership skills, with experience selecting, developing, and coaching BT operations and SRE teams.
• Demonstrated ability to foster engagement, accountability, and performance through clear expectations, recognition, and continuous feedback.
• Strong understanding of ITSM and SRE frameworks (e.g., ITIL, Google SRE principles) and modern service delivery practices.
• Experience with observability and ITSM platforms (e.g., ServiceNow, Datadog, Splunk, Prometheus, Remedy, Jira Service Management) and automation/self-service capabilities. * Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to interact effectively across development, infrastructure, and business domains.
• Ability to balance strategic thinking with tactical execution to deliver measurable reliability and performance outcomes.
• Strong problem-solving, decision-making, and analytical skills, with attention to detail and the ability to prioritize effectively under pressure.
• High learning agility and adaptability in a rapidly changing technology and business landscape.
• Advanced experience managing operational budgets, vendors, and service contracts, including cloud and reliability tooling vendors.
• Ability to translate organizational values into leadership practices that foster positive culture and team cohesion in hybrid and distributed work environments.
• Demonstrated success in implementing service and reliability improvements, operational efficiency gains, and measurable customer experience enhancements.
• Solid project and program management skills, ensuring service and reliability initiatives are delivered on time, within budget, and aligned to business outcomes.
• Valid driver's license.

#IND100

How we will take care of you:

Our job titles may span more than one career level (associate, senior, principal, etc.). The actual title and base pay offered is dependent upon many factors, such as: training, transferable skills, work experience, business needs and market demands. The base pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future. This role is eligible for variable compensation and other benefits.