Director Global Datacenter Operations Team

Who are we?

• Afiniti is the world’s leading applied artificial intelligence and advanced analytics provider.
• Afiniti Enterprise Behavioral Pairing™ uses artificial intelligence to identify subtle and valuable patterns of human interaction in order to pair individuals on the basis of behavior, leading to more successful interactions and measurable increases in enterprise profitability.
• Afiniti operates throughout the world and has measurably driven billions of dollars in incremental value for our clients.

Purpose:

• This position will be responsible for delivering high quality, reliable IT infrastructure, operations and services This position is operationally responsible for ensuring the global availability, integrity, and scalability of Afiniti Infrastructure services and operations at Afiniti datacenters, Cloud and customer deployed servers.
• The Director GDOT /Infra position will report to VP Enterprise Infrastructure and manage the team in charge of Afiniti Datacenter Operations, cloud services, Servers and Storage Management at Afiniti premises and Customer Premises deployments.
• Director Infrastructure will provide vision and leadership to the GDOT / Infra Team.

Key Responsibilities:

•   Managing a high-performing cloud computing and Data Center Operations Team responsible for the planning, installation, maintenance and operation of server, storage hardware and supporting infrastructure at scale.
•   Partner with VP Enterprise Infrastructure to manage the evaluation and adoption of emerging Datacenter technologies including cloud, software defined Datacenters, high performance computing, Servers and Storage virtualization etc.
•   Ensure cost-effective design, development, integration, implementation, testing, and maintenance of new services, equipment and systems in support of Infrastructure objectives and goals.
•   Develop and lead a high performing infrastructure engineering and operations team to ensure the reliable delivery of infrastructure services and operations.
•   Build strong links between production support operations and engineering to create multidisciplinary teams that work together (remove silos).
•   Oversee cybersecurity protections on all IT infrastructure resources according to policies and standards established by the information security function/CISO.
•   Implement and maintain controls and monitoring procedures to ensure availability of critical systems, and minimal service interruptions.

The ideal Candidate will have:

•   A minimum of 10 years of Director and Senior Manager technology leadership positions with an emphasis on infrastructure services.
•   Substantial experience leading, directing and controlling a complex, highly technical operations, production support and engineering team.

Hands on Expertise and knowledge of:

•   IT Infrastructure Operations and Services
•   Linux and Open Source
•   technology life cycle management
•   AWS, Azure Cloud infrastructure
•   IaaS (public and private cloud)
•   CaaS (containers as a service)
•   PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)
•   networking
•   Enterprise Storage Arrays (SAN,NAS, Backups)
•   infrastructure and technology-based security practices
•   application and infrastructure monitoring
•   virtualization and Containerization
•   business continuity
•   disaster recovery and high Availability
•   scalability
•   continuous integration/delivery

Hands on Skills:

• 10+ years of experience engineering and supporting Linux (RHEL/CENTOS) and Virtualization (Citrix Xen/VMware /RHEV/ KVM) in a large-scale environment
• Experience supporting computing technologies for researchers (experience within a multinational IT Software and services development environment is preferred)
• Strong organizational and analytical skills
• Experience supporting Functional and production development efforts, custom applications, etc.
• Dependability and reliability
• Methodical and disciplined approach to problem solving
• Ability to be on-call 24x7
• Ability to manage multiple simultaneous projects with minimal supervision
• Demonstrated experience with advanced configurations such as high availability, SAN/NAS  Storage, FC Switches, virtualization, performance tuning, etc.
• Experience working within a dynamic R&D environment
• Experience researching, evaluating, and supporting new Open Source technologies
• Experience supporting enterprise-class applications and databases
• Experience deploying Linux on x86 rack-mount server and blade platforms
• Experience connecting Linux and vsphere systems to enterprise storage, and understanding of appropriate use cases for SAN and NAS
• Experience connecting Linux systems to TCP/IP networks, configuring, troubleshooting, tuning, etc.
• Excellent Expertise mandatory with server virtualization technologies
• Strong scripting skills with experience in Perl, Python, PHP, Bash, or other scripting languages
• Implemented automatic configuration system (Ansible, Puppet, Chef, CFEngine, etc.)
• Strong Linux security skills/experience
• Experience with AWS and other Cloud infrastructure platforms

Education:  Graduate degree in computer sciences and / or Electrical engineering, or a related field.