Director, IT Platform Architecture & Engineering

Position at HNI Corporation

Description

Position at HNI Corporation

HNI Corporation is a global family of brands for the workplace and home dedicated to enhancing the spaces where we live, work, and gather. We pride ourselves on fostering an environment where we make a positive impact on others; upholding our beliefs in integrity, inclusion and belonging.

The Director, IT Platform Architecture & Engineering owns the Service Strategy and Service Design phases of HNI’s ITIL-based IT organization for infrastructure — networking, data center, server, storage, end-user compute, M365, and Azure/Oracle cloud. Leading a small team of senior domain architects, the Director defines the future-state environment, sets technical standards, and hands accepted design packages to the engineering and operations teams that build and run them.

The role is central to integrating multiple mature technology environments following significant acquisitions: evaluating what each brings, deciding what the combined enterprise should run, and driving multi-year data center, cloud, network, and end-user consolidation as managed programs. Designs must meet enterprise security requirements before delivery begins. Success demands breadth across infrastructure with hands-on depth, credibility with senior engineers, and the executive presence to defend investment priorities and tradeoffs.

This position is based at HNI’s Muscatine, Iowa campus and requires on-site presence more than 50% of the time, with additional travel to plants, distribution centers, and data center locations as business needs require.

• Define the future-state architecture strategy across networking, end-user technology, cloud, data center, compute, storage, and virtualization.
• Own ITIL Service Strategy and Service Design for infrastructure services - service definitions, design specifications, and capacity, availability, resiliency, and continuity requirements - and deliver accepted design packages to Service Transition and Operations before build begins.
• Set technology standards, design patterns, and multi-year roadmaps; retire technical debt and redundant platforms; evaluate emerging technology for enterprise fit, including capacity and platform architecture for AI and data workloads and the governance of Copilot-class services.
• Build enterprise security requirements into every design - identity, segmentation, zero trust, hardening, logging - obtain cybersecurity sign-off before delivery, and own remediation of audit findings against architecture.
• Extend architecture standards to plant-floor and OT environments, including plant networks, OT/IT convergence, and segmentation of manufacturing systems, in partnership with manufacturing engineering and cybersecurity.
• Design infrastructure so change management, privileged access, and evidence retention satisfy SOX ITGC and external audit testing.
• Hold decision authority on infrastructure architecture and major design changes, weighing scalability, resiliency, supportability, and cost, with input from engineering, operations, cybersecurity, and enterprise architecture.

• Lead the multi-year strategy for integrating and rationalizing multiple enterprise-scale infrastructure environments following acquisitions.
• Decide what to keep, replace, or standardize - leveraging the strongest inherited capabilities and introducing new technology where it better serves the combined enterprise.
• Build transition architectures and roadmaps for data center consolidation, cloud rationalization, network convergence, and end-user consolidation.
• Identify dependencies,…