Manager, Data Center Operations & Networking Engineering

#
** Job Description
** The IT Manager, Data Center Operations & Network Engineering is responsible for the strategic direction, operational excellence, reliability, security, and lifecycle management of the organization’s on-premises data centers, colocation facilities, enterprise network infrastructure, and cloud-connected environments. This role leads teams responsible for physical data center operations, network engineering, telecommunications, and infrastructure services to ensure highly available, secure, scalable, and resilient technology platforms that support business-critical operations.

The position provides leadership for infrastructure service delivery, data center and network architecture, disaster recovery readiness, capacity planning, incident management, vendor oversight, and technology modernization. The manager partners with Information Security, systems and cloud engineering, application teams, business stakeholders, and service providers to align infrastructure capabilities with organizational growth, regulatory obligations, and operational priorities.
** Essential Duties and Responsibilities
** include the following. Other duties may be assigned.
** On Premises Data Center Operations
*** Lead day-to-day and long-term operations of enterprise-owned on-premises data centers, disaster recovery sites, and colocation facilities.
* Manage physical data center space, racks, cabinets, structured cabling, power utilization, cooling, environmental monitoring, and capacity forecasts.
* Coordinate installation, relocation, maintenance, and decommissioning of servers, storage, network equipment, and supporting infrastructure.
* Ensure physical security, access controls, maintenance procedures, documentation, and operational standards are consistently followed.
* Oversee facility incidents and planned maintenance involving generators, UPS systems, power distribution, cooling, fire suppression, and building services.
* Develop data center growth, consolidation, modernization, and lifecycle plans that balance resiliency, cost, capacity, and business risk.
** Network Engineering and Architecture
*** Lead the architecture, engineering, implementation, and lifecycle management of enterprise LAN, WAN, data center, internet, wireless, and remote-access networks.
* Oversee core routing and switching, firewalls, load balancers, DNS, DHCP, IP address management, VPN, SD-WAN, and network management platforms.
* Design resilient connectivity between on-premises data centers, colocation facilities, corporate locations, cloud platforms, business partners, and external clients.
* Establish network architecture standards for segmentation, redundancy, scalability, performance, security, and recoverability.
* Drive network modernization, automation, observability, configuration management, and infrastructure-as-code practices where appropriate.
* Partner with cloud and platform engineering teams on hybrid connectivity, cloud routing, private connectivity, network security controls, and traffic management.
** Network Operations and Service Reliability
*** Ensure 24x7 availability and performance of critical network and data center services through proactive monitoring, alerting, and operational readiness.
* Lead response to major network and infrastructure incidents, including technical escalation, stakeholder communication, service restoration, root cause analysis, and corrective actions.
* Define and report service metrics for availability, latency, packet loss, capacity, incident trends, change success, and recovery performance.
* Oversee network capacity planning, circuit utilization, performance tuning, hardware refreshes, software upgrades, patching, and vulnerability remediation.
* Maintain accurate network diagrams, circuit inventories, configurations, support documentation, and operational runbooks.
** Network Security and Compliance
*** Partner with Information Security to implement secure network architectures, segmentation, firewall governance, zero trust principles, and secure remote access.
* Ensure infrastructure and network controls support applicable corporate security policies, audit requirements, and regulatory obligations.
* Coordinate vulnerability remediation, security assessments, access reviews, logging, evidence collection, and audit responses for data center and network services.
* Maintain separation of production, non-production, disaster recovery, management, partner, and user network zones based on approved security…