Who We Are:
The Orthodox Union (OU) is the largest Orthodox Jewish organization in the United States. Founded in 1898, the OU supports a network of synagogues, youth programs, Jewish and Religious Zionist advocacy programs, programs for the disabled, localized religious study programs, and international units. The OU maintains a kosher certification service, whose circled U symbol is found on the labels of many kosher commercial and consumer food products.
Job Overview:
We are seeking an experienced Director of IT Infrastructure to lead and evolve our global IT infrastructure team and strategy. We are seeking a unique individual who has good technical breadth, significant leadership maturity, and a sense of strategic IT vision. This role is critical in ensuring reliable, scalable, and secure IT operations across our on-premises, hybrid, and remote users, our headquarters and hub offices, our many global satellite locations, and our cloud production environment which hosts all of our various content and workflow applications used across the enterprise. You will manage a diverse team of up to 20 personnel, including Network/Cloud Operations, Security Operations, Helpdesk, IT Project Management, and overall IT Service Delivery, supporting a hybrid/remote workforce and business-critical systems. The Director will develop infrastructure strategies, enhance system performance, support the organization's technology needs across multiple departments, and ensure the broader organization is both involved in the prioritization of and aware of the IT infrastructure group’s activities, including publishing structured metrics on departmental objectives and performance.
The recently revised OU strategic plan approved by the board of directors and the executive leadership calls for the OU to accelerate innovation and streamline core operations and programming divisions through the improved utilization of IT-related technologies to drive this acceleration and positive change. The organization is seeking a Director of IT Infrastructure to lead a big part of this new mandate. As Director of IT Infrastructure, you will lead the design, implementation, and optimization of next-generation infrastructure and security tools, endpoint management solutions, develop contact-center solutions and teams to support the user community, drive automation, and leverage privacy-protected AI solutions to accelerate the organizational mission using technology. You will own vendor management across IT and be responsible for ensuring the OU is maximizing its use of vendor-provided hardware, software, and services.
You would enjoy this role if you are a service-oriented, cloud-native, mobile-first, infrastructure-as-code, security-driven design Infrastructure leader. You should be an operations leader who is also able to drive project activities. This role offers the rare opportunity to both architect and lead transformative change in a mission-driven environment. If you're a contemporary hands-on technology leader eager to drive modernization at scale, this is your moment to build, lead, and elevate IT in service of a larger purpose.
Key Responsibilities:
The Director of IT Infrastructure will carry the following areas of responsibility:
Team Leadership & Collaboration
- Directly supervise, mentor, and continuously improve the operations of network & cloud
- Develop and execute a global IT infrastructure strategy aligned with business goals.
- Foster a collaborative, high-performance culture across on-site and remote team members.
- Lead technology modernization initiatives, including cloud optimization, network evolution, and automation.
- Collaborate with senior leadership to define IT priorities and investment roadmaps.
- Manage and mentor a team of IT professionals, providing guidance and career development.
- Work closely with business leaders to align IT infrastructure with organizational goals.
- Partner with vendors and service providers to evaluate and implement new technologies.
Infrastructure & Operations Management
- Oversee the design, deployment, and maintenance of the OU’s physical and cloud IT infrastructure, including on-premises devices, servers, storage, networking equipment, all cloud resources, and enterprise applications.
- Oversee the use and continuous improvement of all IT Service Management platforms and tools including ServiceNow, and all of the toolsets used for telemetry, management, monitoring, and automation supporting the IT Infrastructure teams and scope of services.
- Oversee the end-user support helpdesk function, ensuring user’s needs are met properly by helpdesk staff, escalated and resolved as required by other IT groups, addressed and resolved in a timely manner, and any approvals are properly attained when appropriate before actioning user requests.
- Ensure high availability, performance, and security of IT systems and services.
- Drive proactive monitoring, incident management, and root cause analysis.
- Develop infrastructure-as-code and other automation approaches to streamline the uniformity and efficiency of maintaining the organization’s infrastructure.
- Develop automation and computer-assisted AI capabilities to drive efficiency, increase end-user self-service opportunities, and improve the infrastructure team’s delivery overall.
- Develop and implement SLAs, published operational metrics, and other visibility for the organization to gain transparency into the infrastructure group’s activities and performance.
- Manage IT asset lifecycle, including procurement, maintenance, and upgrades.
- Manage IT-related vendor contracts and sourcing of products, including pricing, term commitments, quantities, and other contracted considerations.
- Maintain budget projections and expense management on all IT infrastructure-related expenditures.
- Maintain project timelines and ensure all projects are driven through a consistent set of project governance processes, utilizing tools to provide organizational leadership with ongoing transparency and visibility into project metrics and deliverable statuses, risks, etc.
- Develop and implement disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
Cybersecurity & Compliance
- Oversee the Information Security function for the organization.
- Facilitate information security policy discussions across peer-groups in legal, compliance, and leadership, publishing official policies once approved.
- Drive the enforcement of cybersecurity best practices to protect organizational data and systems.
- Collaborate with internal stakeholders to develop and maintain IT security procedures in compliance with the published policies.
- Evaluate requests to determine the best way to achieve within security policies, and recommend to leadership while also facilitating approved policy exceptions.
- Partner with other operational groups, including HR on all relevant matters of security policy enforcement and remediation concerns.
Cloud & Digital Transformation
- Lead the organizations cloud-ops function and continued transformation leveraging cloud-native platforms to enhance operational effectiveness, improve architecture, achieve automation, and maintain meaningful uptime monitoring and alerting.
- Drive automation and integrated workflows such as CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and good deployment, monitoring, and troubleshooting best practices.
- Optimize cloud-based infrastructure and applications balancing scalability and cost-effectiveness.
- Manage relationships with cloud service providers and ensure optimal usage.
Qualifications & Requirements:
Education: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, or a related field. Master's degree preferred.
Experience:
- 7+ years of IT infrastructure experience, with at least 3 years in a leadership role, including cloud operations management.
- Strong knowledge of modern networking, cloud computing (AWS, Azure), cybersecurity, and enterprise IT systems.
- Experience with virtualization, storage solutions, and disaster recovery planning.
- Proven track record of managing IT teams and driving infrastructure improvements.
- Experience with deployment and maximizing enterprise ITSM tools such as ServiceNow desired.
- Familiarity with ITIL, NIST, or other IT governance frameworks is a plus.
- Experience leveraging LLM and other AI toolsets to support infrastructure objectives is a plus.
- Experience operating in an Agile project delivery model utilizing tools such as Asana, and JIRA desired.
- Excellent problem-solving, communication, and project management skills.
Salary and Benefits:
The salary for this position is between $180,000 and $210,000, commensurate with experience.
We offer employee-sponsored healthcare, dental and vision plans.
Other benefits include:
- Paid sick days
- Paid vacation days
- Paid Jewish and most Federal holidays
- Paid parental leave
- Short Fridays to accommodate for the Sabbath
- Free life and disability insurance)
- 403(b) retirement plan, which the OU will contribute 5% of your wage towards retirement savings after you contribute at least 2% (only eligible after 3 years of continuous service