Assistant Director of Cloud Infrastructure Services
Requisition Number:
63288
Location:
Boulder, Colorado
City
Boulder
State
Colorado
Employment Type:
University Staff
Schedule:
Full-Time
Posting Close Date:
20-Apr-2025
Date Posted:
07-Apr-2025
Job Summary
The Office of Information Technology (OIT) at CU Boulder encourages applications for an Assistant Director, Cloud Infrastructure Services! This leadership position works with the Director, IT Service Engineering and is a key member of the organization's vision and strategy development for cloud infrastructure services, including the areas of public and private cloud infrastructure, container platforms, and storage environments. This position acts as a focal point for the continued development, growth, implementation, and operations of these areas and will help coordinate the further adoption of services across both the research and administrative spaces, ensuring these areas are robust, reliable, scalable, and innovative to meet the evolving needs of the university. This includes leading the cultural and organizational changes required for cloud adoption.
This position may manage various cloud infrastructure projects and will connect with both campus clients (Researchers, Teaching Faculty, etc.) and internal OIT (Office of Information Technology) clients to understand their requirements and to design and implement the best technology solution that meets their needs while assuring alignment to campus IT security standards.
This position will supervise and lead three key teams: Cloud Foundations Services, Container Platform Engineering, and Virtual Infrastructure and Storage Engineering. This role requires both technical expertise and strong leadership skills to guide the development and implementation of strategic cloud infrastructure initiatives!
The University of Colorado Boulder is committed to building a culturally diverse community of faculty, staff, and students dedicated to contributing to an inclusive campus environment. We are an Equal Opportunity employer, including veterans and individuals with disabilities.
Who We Are
Vision
- The Office of Information Technology will be valued by campus as a strategic, inclusive and innovative partner in advancing learning and discovery in order to enable CU Boulder to be a premier public university.
Mission
- The Office of Information Technology enables campus priorities by providing high-value IT services and solutions.
Values
- Trust, as a foundation for how we engage with one another and with campus partners, along with
- Avid curiosity in how to better support the campus and our stakeholder's while;
- Fostering empowerment and authentic engagement amongst ourselves and;
- Celebrating inclusivity that promotes a sense of belonging while acknowledging that each person is unique and valued.
Strategy
OIT will advance learning and discovery by delivering high-value reliable IT services and solutions that:
- Provide a fluid and adaptable academic and student experience.
- Enable research competitiveness and;
- Deliver core infrastructure and enterprise IT services for business effectiveness.
Based on our departmental goals and our commitment to diversity and inclusive excellence, OIT particularly welcomes applications from candidates whose knowledge, skills, and abilities, and desire to contribute to an inclusive campus environment, will help us achieve our vision of a diverse and inclusive community.
What Your Key Responsibilities Will Be
Leadership & Team Management
- Lead and manage the public, private, and container platform teams as a unified, cohesive unit, ensuring alignment across all areas of Cloud Infrastructure Services to drive collaboration, efficiency, and consistency in delivering cloud solutions.
- Lead and manage the Cloud Foundation Services and Container Platform Engineering teams as the product owner/manager, providing direct oversight of individual contributors.
- Manage the Virtual Infrastructure and Storage Engineering team through the team manager, ensuring alignment with university goals and OIT strategy.
- Provide mentoring, coaching, and career development for staff within these teams, ensuring professional growth and skill development.
- Cultivate a collaborative, inclusive, and innovative environment to enhance team performance and accountability.
- Set and supervise performance goals for all teams, aligning them with OIT objectives and university IT strategy.
- Drive employee engagement and retention through a focus on team-building initiatives and professional development.
Product Owner/Manager - Cloud Foundations Service
- Leadership of a team of professional staff members and students to design effective, efficient, scalable, and secure cloud platform offerings.
- Serve as the voice of the customer for Public Cloud users on campus, representing their needs in a central cloud enablement service.
- Prioritize an Agile backlog to assess the Cloud Foundations team in delivering maximum value to the campus and system customers.
- Assist an experienced agile team in facilitating agile ceremonies (team does not have an agile coach separate from this role).
- Participate in cross-campus cloud enablement efforts and align services with cross-campus needs as appropriate.
- Conduct regular partner meetings to communicate progress and seek input to future priorities.
- Perform regular outreach to groups who might not be represented in the partners group to garner participation and input.
Product Owner/Manager - Container Platform Engineering
- Lead the development and optimization of containerized application environments, focusing on container orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes).
- Ensure the availability and scalability of containerized application platforms for university research, teaching, and operational needs.
- Drive standard processes in the development, deployment, and management of containerized applications, emphasizing automation and CI/CD pipeline integration.
- Manage the Virtual Infrastructure and Storage Engineering team through the team manager, supervising the infrastructure responsible for virtual machines, storage, and backup services.
- Ensure the design and implementation of hybrid cloud and on-premises storage solutions to meet the data storage needs for research, academic, and administrative resources.
- Work closely with the team to improve disaster recovery and data protection strategies for university systems.
Cloud Architecture
This position will support the organization’s cloud vision and strategy by educating, demonstrating and training others within and outside the organization. This position will design the foundational cloud services needed by the campus and enhance these services to meet changing needs. Responsibilities in this area include:
- Leading creation and maintenance of a well-informed public and private cloud strategy for CU Boulder.
- Working closely with IT security to supervise the security posture of both public and private cloud environments.
- Identification of the top cloud architecture solutions to successfully meet the strategic needs of the University across both public and private cloud domains.
- Providing guidance to other IT teams both in and outside of OIT in usage of public and private cloud technologies and services.
- Participation in higher education groups supporting Public and Private Cloud to ensure CU Boulder is taking advantage of new strategies and to ensure CU Boulder is an authority in the adoption of public cloud.
Architecture Review Board (ARB) Participation and Representation
- Function as a member of the campus ARB as a research computing and cloud expert by participating in review proposed technology solutions, making architectural recommendations, development and documenting technical standards or patterns and leading specific design and/or architecture decision-making efforts. This includes being temporarily assigned to specific projects or teams to lead and facilitate an architectural or technical design decision, or transfer domain specific knowledge to the team.
Budget & Resource Management
- This position will assist in the development and management of the cloud infrastructure budget, ensuring efficient resource allocation and cost management. This position will evaluate and recommend cloud service providers, software, and tools based on cost, performance, and fit with university requirements.
Professional Development
- This position will maintain professional expertise in the field by reviewing trade publications, lists, studying the latest vendor trends, reviewing pertinent mailing lists and attending seminars, training sessions and conferences. This position will identify and elect relevant training opportunities that would be most beneficial to the organization.
Strategic Relationship Management
- This position will engage with customers in schools, colleges, and administrative units as well as peers on other campuses to ensure OIT is meeting their technology needs and evaluate potential opportunities for new services not currently provided. This position is responsible for evaluating client cloud needs and identifying potential cloud solutions. This requires an understanding of the customers' perceived and actual needs as well as understanding budget constraints and making a recommendation on how to best meet customer needs.
What You Should Know
- This position is in a hybrid work situation, working primarily remotely. This role may infrequently be expected to come on-site, 1 - 2 times per year. Applicants from outside of Colorado are encouraged to apply.
What We Can Offer
- Salary: $131,000 - $147,330.
Benefits
The University of Colorado offers excellent benefits, including medical, dental, retirement, paid time off, tuition benefit and ECO Pass. The University of Colorado Boulder is one of the largest employers in Boulder County and offers an inspiring higher education environment. Learn more about the University of Colorado Boulder.
Be Statements
Be collaborative. Be enlightened. Be Boulder.
What We Require
- A Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent experience from an accredited institution in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a closely related field. A combination of education and/or job-related experience as described below may be substituted for the degree on a year for year basis.
- 5 years of experience, including:
- 3 years of experience managing a team of IT Professionals.
- IT architect experience in public or private cloud services that includes:
- Both the development of high-level business strategy and IT planning and the ability to translate into technical solutions.
- Successful experience designing and architecting complex IT environments including various components of networking, server, storage, backups and disaster recovery in both cloud and physical on-premises environments.
- Solid experience with the computational needs of University researchers.
- Experience with multiple major Cloud vendors (Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform) and their service offerings.
What You Will Need
- Good understanding of higher education IT and unique requirements of research institutes, departments and schools.
- Strong collaborative skills and ability to work with colleagues to solve sophisticated problems.
- Superb communication skills, with the ability to convey sophisticated technical concepts to non-technical partners.
- Strong customer service and relationship skills.
- Understanding of ITIL4 stages including service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation and continual service improvement.
- Understanding of networking, DNS and DHCP.
- Understanding of firewall and load balancing technologies.
What We Would Like You to Have
- Experience working with University Researchers and Research Teams.
- Solid experience incorporating security, system design and data privacy standard methodologies into the architecture.
- Experience mapping compliance standards (e.g. NIST 800-53, 800-171) to technical controls.
- Experience with cost management and optimization strategies in cloud environments.
- Knowledge of the software development lifecycle.
- Knowledge of DevOps concepts.
- ITILv3 Foundation certification.
- AWS, Azure or GCP certifications, especially Solution Architect or Administrator certifications.
- Extensive experience with cloud infrastructure services (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), containerization (e.g., Kubernetes, Docker), and virtual infrastructure management (e.g., VMware, Hyper-V).
- Solid understanding of storage technologies, disaster recovery solutions, and data management in cloud environments.
- 3 years of experience managing a team of IT Professionals.
- 5 years of IT architect experience in public or private cloud services.
Special Instructions
To apply, please submit the following materials:
- A current resume.
- A cover letter that specifically tells us how your background and experience align with the requirements, qualifications, and responsibilities of the position.
We may request references at a later time.
Please apply by April 20, 2025 for consideration.
Note: Application materials will not be accepted via email. For consideration, please apply through CU Boulder Jobs.
In compliance with the Colorado Job Application Fairness Act, in any materials you submit, you may redact or remove age-identifying information such as age, date of birth, or dates of school attendance or graduation. You will not be penalized for redacting or removing this information.
Posting Contact Information
Posting Contact Name: Boulder Campus Human Resources
Posting Contact Email: Recruiting@colorado.edu