Director, IT Infrastructure

Director, IT Infrastructure Conservation International protects nature for the benefit of humanity. Through science, policy, fieldwork, and finance, we spotlight and secure the most important places in nature for the climate, biodiversity, and for people. With offices in 30 countries and projects in more than 100 countries, Conservation International partners with governments, companies, civil society, Indigenous peoples, and local communities to help people and nature thrive together.

POSITION SUMMARY - This position is based in Arlington, VAThe Director, IT Infrastructure leads strategy, architecture, and operations for CI’s global infrastructure services, enabling secure, reliable, and scalable technology for staff, partners, and mission delivery worldwide. This role has end-to-end accountability for CI’s hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructure roadmap and operating model across the Microsoft cloud platform (Azure and Microsoft 365 tenant and platform services), AWS, and on-premise environments, including global network, server/compute, storage, virtualization, backup/recovery, monitoring, and remote access.

The Director is accountable for availability, performance, security, and lifecycle management of core infrastructure platforms and shared services, and for partnering with Cybersecurity, Applications, Data, and Service Desk teams to deliver an excellent employee experience. The role leads a globally distributed team and key vendors/managed service providers, building modern operational practices (ITIL/ITSM, SRE-informed reliability, automation, observability, and continuous improvement) and ensuring CI’s infrastructure meets organizational risk, compliance, and business continuity requirements.

RESPONSIBILITIESDefine and execute CI’s global infrastructure strategy and multi-year roadmap across Azure and Microsoft 365 (tenant/platform services), AWS, and on-premise environments, aligning to enterprise architecture, security, and business priorities.

Own infrastructure platforms and shared services end-to-end, including global network services (WAN/LAN/Wi-Fi, SD-WAN/VPN, internet edge, DNS), server/compute and virtualization, storage, backup/recovery, monitoring/observability, remote access, and core directory/identity dependencies.

Lead global operations with clear service ownership, SLAs/SLOs, and mature incident/problem/change management; drive continuous improvement through automation, standardization, and measurable operational KPIs.Establish cloud platform engineering and governance for Azure and AWS, including landing zones, account/subscription design, network segmentation, identity integration, policy/guardrails, encryption and key management integration, and infrastructure-as-code automation.

Own reliability, resilience, and business continuity for infrastructure services, including DR strategy, backup architecture, recovery objectives, regular testing/exercises, and post-incident reviews.

Partner with Cybersecurity to embed security-by-design and zero-trust principles, including privileged access, configuration standards, vulnerability remediation, logging, and compliance controls for Azure, Microsoft 365, AWS, and on-prem platforms.

Provide executive-level technical leadership and architecture governance for infrastructure decisions; set standards and reference architectures; review and approve major designs and changes.

Manage infrastructure financial stewardship, including budgeting, forecasting, vendor/contract management, licensing, and cost optimization (Fin Ops) across cloud and on-prem services.

Collaborate with Applications, Data, Finance, and business stakeholders to enable mission-critical enterprise systems and integrations; ensure infrastructure designs are scalable,…