Director, Systems Engineering - Worcester Polytechnic Institute

LOCATION DEPARTMENT NAME DIVISION NAMEJOB DESCRIPTION SUMMARY JOB DESCRIPTION Strategic Leadership and Team Development

• Develop and implement a comprehensive systems strategy aligned with the university's goals and objectives.
• Provide strategic direction for systems operations and administration, storage, cloud computing and virtualization, application system and security support, and Campus Safety Services.
• Collaborate with the Assistant CTO and other senior leaders to prioritize systems initiatives and align them with institutional priorities.
• Develop staff, set clear performance expectations, and manage workload and operational tasks across the systems team.
• Work with other groups within IT and other business units as needed to develop solutions for unique system requirements, including technical and regulatory requirements.

• Working directly with the Systems Engineers who report to this role, direct the design, implementation, and management of the university's physical and virtual server infrastructure, enterprise storage and backup platforms, and AWS and Azure cloud environments.
• Participate actively in solution design, technical review, and implementation planning alongside the engineering team.
• Ensure efficient utilization of resources through effective virtualization, capacity planning, and lifecycle management.
• Lead the evaluation, selection, and adoption of new platform technologies to enhance systems capabilities.
• Ensure new implementations are documented, supportable, and aligned with institutional standards and architecture.

• Oversee the team that performs the day-to-day operation and administration of the university's systems environment, ensuring the stability, availability, and performance of all system components.
• Ensure all key services, systems, and components are under appropriate monitoring and alerting.
• Ensure operating system patching, firmware maintenance, and lifecycle activities are performed on a defined and predictable cadence.
• Ensure that all documentation and databases are up to date and accurate, including asset inventory and configuration records.
• Serve as the senior escalation point for the team during major incidents, directing the response, restoring service, and driving root cause analysis and preventive action to completion.
• Ensure all systems incidents and service requests are fully resolved within the applicable SLA and maintain open lines of communication with other ITS teams, including the Service Desk.