Director, Enterprise Research & Automation Services

Department: Information Technology Services

Classification: Administrative Faculty

Job Category: Administrative or Professional Faculty

Job Type: Full-Time

Work Schedule: Full-time (1.0 FTE, 40 hrs/wk)

Location: Fairfax, VA

Workplace Type: On Site Required

Sponsorship Eligibility: Not eligible for visa sponsorship

Salary: Up to $182,000 annually; commensurate with education and experience

Criminal Background Check: Yes

The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) department drives the university’s digital modernization, technical strategy, and institutional agility through four foundational pillars:
Enterprise Infrastructure, Applications, Architecture, and Research. Operatingcentrally within Information Technology Services (ITS), the Research pillar identifies, prototypes, evaluates, and scalescutting-edge computing environments, automated workflows, and advanced intelligence applications. The unit focuses on shiftingmanual paradigms into optimized digital patterns, deployinghigh-performance systems, and ensuring emerging platforms aresafely and effectively integrated into the fabric of the universityto support institutional strategy.

The Director, Enterprise Research & Automation Services provides strategic and technical leadership over the university’sinstitutional research and automation systems, advanced researchpipelines, and enterprise automation strategies. This positionoversees the engineering, optimization, and scaling of the Mason Research, Intelligence, Data, and Automation Systems platform, aswell as enterprise-wide workflow automation initiatives. The Director manages a dedicated team of professional staff and studentdevelopers to run rapid-prototyping initiatives, eliminate manualoperational friction, and support advanced research computing—allwhile operating in strict compliance with cybersecurity, data privacy, and technology governance frameworks established by the Chief Information Officer's (CIO’s) office.

• Serve as the focal point for Central Research Services to the Office of Research and Compute, and the Distributed GMU Researchcommunity—supporting GMU Research Council and stakeholderforums/working groups, etc.;
• Direct the architectural scaling, maintenance, and technicalexecution of the Mason Research, Intelligence, Data, and Automation Systems platform;
• Oversee the aggregation and indexing of complex institutionaldatasets into unified information pipelines, enabling real-timepredictive analytics and executive visibility dashboards;
• Enforce rigid data synchronization protocols across the platform to ensure a single source of truth (SSOT) and eliminatedata fragmentation across administrative systems; and
• Accelerate the systemic elimination of manual operationaloverhead across all academic, research, and administrative unitsthrough active partnership and exploration engagements of the George Mason University business and research needs.

• Lead the institutional automation lifecycle by identifying,designing, and deploying modern robotic process automation (RPA),intelligent workflows, functional apps, and system orchestrationmodels across academic and operational units, intentionallyconverting slow, legacy department habits into high-velocitydigital workflows while maintaining a centralized automationregistry to minimize institutional technical debt;
• Partner with university stakeholders to systematically reviewhigh-friction, manual workflows and transition them intohigh-velocity, automated digital processes;
• Manage the automation registry to maximize the reuse of software agents and minimize technical debt;
• Define, track, and document the financial and operationalreturn on investment (ROI) for all research and automationdeployments; and
• Build and maintain executive observability dashboards thatquantify exact administrative hours reclaimed, error rateseliminated, and compute economics optimized, providing directvisibility to ITS executive leadership.

• Manage the dedicated Research, AI, and advanced…