Director, Enterprise Research & Automation Services

Director, Enterprise Research & Automation Services

Fairfax, VA

Administrative Faculty

Administrative or Professional Faculty

Full-Time

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

Fairfax, VA

On Site Required

Not eligible for visa sponsorship

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

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. Operating centrally within Information Technology Services (ITS), the Research pillar identifies, prototypes, evaluates, and scales cutting-edge computing environments, automated workflows, and advanced intelligence applications. The unit focuses on shifting manual paradigms into optimized digital patterns, deploying high-performance systems, and ensuring emerging platforms are safely and effectively integrated into the fabric of the university to support institutional strategy.

The Director, Enterprise Research & Automation Services provides strategic and technical leadership over the university's institutional research and automation systems, advanced research pipelines, and enterprise automation strategies. This position oversees the engineering, optimization, and scaling of the Mason Research, Intelligence, Data, and Automation Systems platform, as well as enterprise-wide workflow automation initiatives. The Director manages a dedicated team of professional staff and student developers to run rapid-prototyping initiatives, eliminate manual operational friction, and support advanced research computing-all while 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 Research community-supporting GMU Research Council and stakeholder forums/working groups, etc;
• Direct the architectural scaling, maintenance, and technical execution of the Mason Research, Intelligence, Data, and Automation Systems platform;
• Oversee the aggregation and indexing of complex institutional datasets into unified information pipelines, enabling real-time predictive analytics and executive visibility dashboards;
• Enforce rigid data synchronization protocols across the platform to ensure a single source of truth (SSOT) and eliminate data fragmentation across administrative systems; and
• Accelerate the systemic elimination of manual operational overhead across all academic, research, and administrative units through 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 orchestration models across academic and operational units, intentionally converting slow, legacy department habits into high-velocity digital workflows while maintaining a centralized automation registry to minimize institutional technical debt;
• Partner with university stakeholders to systematically review high-friction, manual workflows and transition them into high-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 operational return on investment (ROI) for all research and automation deployments; and
• Build and maintain executive observability dashboards that quantify exact administrative hours reclaimed, error rates eliminated, and compute economics optimized, providing direct visibility to ITS executive leadership.

• Manage the dedicated Research, AI, and advanced computing lane in coordination with academic units and university…