Director - IMT Engineering

APU is seeking employees who desire to engage in our thriving culture by cultivating community through professional interactions, demonstrating a posture of lifelong learning, and modeling Christ-like character. Working together, employees at APU commit to establishing a university atmosphere that is pleasing to God and edifying to one another. 

The Director of IMT Engineering will strategically lead and ensure supervision of the IMT Engineering department, an agile development and operations unit responsible for the life-cycle development and support of core technology infrastructure and integration middleware for the University. This includes internal platform services such as cloud and data center services, multi-campus network, software engineering, identity and access management, directory services, integration middleware, and databases. As central IT shifts to become a platform provider, you will serve as the group product manager/owner for our core compute, storage, identity and integration middleware, which will increasingly be leveraged and extended by the rest of IT, federated IT, partners, and customers through productized and programmatic interfaces.

The services provided by this unit support all other service delivery within IMT and university-wide day-to-day business operations. As such, your main goal is to provide a stable, reliable, scalable, supportable and sustainable IT infrastructure which requires recent innovation from computer science disciplines as well as business insight for continuous improvement through DevOps, Lean, Agile, and product management thinking. You will champion continuous and iterative improvement by streamlining value streams, agile team structures, and moving toward agile target IT Architecture, which is cloud first, API enabled, and open-standards based. 

As the Director, you are accountable for all staff, budgets, service quality and service improvement. This position requires a rare combination of senior managerial experience and technical leadership—you must be able to attract and motivate talented technical staff and guide them to design for the future as well as support the present. The ideal candidate would have had direct previous experience as a systems administrator, network administrator, and/or software development lead. You will lead approximately a dozen amazing staff, including an assistant director who will help share the supervisory load. The position reports to the Executive Director of Information Technology.

Required Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field. As this position translates between technical and business concerns a Business related degree would greatly assist. Master’s Degree a plus.
• Certification: Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) desirable.

Required Experience

• Five to seven years of demonstrated technical management/supervisory experience in systems operations and development.
• Seven to ten years of experience in several Information Technology fields including the following disciplines:

• • IT Infrastructure and Web-Scale Operations
  • Systems Administration, Network Administration
  • Telecommunications (Internet circuits, VoIP, Call Center)
  • Product Management
  • Scrum, and providing product ownership to self-managing teams
  • Cloud Architectures and Scalable deployment methods
  • Integration Strategies and Technologies (RESTFul API's)
  • Software Engineering teams
  • Agile Software Development Methodologies
  • IT Architecture Methods & Practices 
  • IT Portfolio Management
  • IT Security
  • DevOps culture, principles, and tools
  • Vendor communication and management
  • Support of client devices
  • Higher Education Context a plus

Primary Duties

• Directs and leads the IMT Engineering department, in a team-based organizational model
• Manages the future strategic approach to core technology and middleware for Azusa Pacific University operations, with a special view toward cloud-native and API-enabled platforms that help IT productize its own services.
• Ensure that staff are professionally developed, performing, and increasingly adapting to collaborative team culture, and that they are receiving discipleship for Christian service in accordance with the Mission of APU.
• Produces yearly strategic and annual operational plans for the Team, including capacity planning, and service improvements.
• Serve as the group product manager and function as a scrum product owner for Engineering products, providing vision to inspire roadmaps, manage backlog refinement, and making larger improvements visible to IMT Strategic Cabinet, and our customers.
• Advance new working paradigms such as DevOps, increasing automation for scalable operations across the board. Advance scripting/coding skills in all areas and promote cross training of developers to understand how to build scalable and fault-tolerant services.
• Promote an environment for internal dialogue for healthy discussion leading to iterative improvements to technology and services provided.
• Make decisions on purchase of new technology, according to IMT practices.
• Provide managerial and strategic leadership necessary to ensure that the network, server, telecommunications, and cloud-based services are operating at their optimal performance, according to IMT Operational Level Agreements (OLA) and Service Level Agreements (SLA).
• Meet regularly with other IMT Directors and colleagues to ensure the teams are providing great internal support and partnering on future initiatives, as well as properly referring some requests to the correct units, since we have overlapping product spaces.
• Accountable for team response to service disruptions, planning for on-call schedule, and escalation for any communication gaps.
• Promotes team practices to ensure a reliable and responsive network, server and enterprise application infrastructure: auditing, tuning, system management, configuration management, capacity planning and auto-scaling, security auditing, performance and health monitoring, system problem resolution, and technical documentation.
• Directs the administrative tasks pertaining to the department, including but not limited to human resources and budget management.
• Manage Engineering portion of the IMT Refresh budget, planning for and executing equipment refreshes according to agreed upon timeframes for optimal performance and least operational risk.
• Provides monthly management reports of the department accomplishments, goals, and challenges.
• Promote practice of quality control of customer service that promotes customer satisfaction. This includes IMT Engineering services provided to other IMT teams in their delivery of service.
• Promote R&D time and experimentation, knowing that it breeds a culture of continuous improvement of both process and product.
• Partner with IMT Security Architect and other resources to assist with risk management.
• Represents the department at management meetings and acts as an IMT representative at external meetings. Be a conduit for feedback both to and from the team. Provide a reliable point of Contact for all departments for strategic issues relating to the university’s IT infrastructure. This will be done by attending meetings on IMT’s behalf and be being available for discussions.
• Be a contributing member of IMT’s monthly strategy team, and weekly management team.
• Keeps abreast of IT advancements, scalable web-native operations, and IT architecture.
• Keeps aware of changing APU use of IT systems and services to identify opportunities to align to target architecture & delivery.
• Sets internal team code of ethics in relationship to stewarding institutional and constituent data.
• Performs tasks assigned by the Executive Director of Information Technology.

Supervisory Responsibility

• This person supervises the IMT Engineering department, approximately a dozen staff, including an assistant director who will help share the supervisory load.

IMT Profile

Level of Independence

• In order to function effectively, this person must have a high level of independence, show a high level of initiative, have the ability to make decisions, and be highly motivated.  This must be done in a consistent with the team management structure that is employed by IMT.

Influence of Results

• This person must recognize that internal customers are critical to the success of IMT at APU.  This requires the person to be well organized, and have an extremely high work ethic.

Other Remarks

• This position requires someone who is totally committed to excellence in customer service, and has a good understanding of APU’s overall business, business structures, and business practices.
• This position requires acceptance of APU’s Christian ethos as encapsulated in the Cornerstones. This person will be required to support and uphold the IMT Charter.
• To enable IMT services to operate normally at all times, this person is required to be available by telephone for management, consultation, and liaison with support, development and technical staff after normal working hours and on weekends.  This may require considerable onsite presence to manage emergency situations.  

Skills 

Leadership

• Understanding of the mission, goals, and objectives of a major university and how information technology supports and enhances essential services including teaching, research and academic support operations.
• A view of leadership as inspiring, coaching, and serving increasingly agile self-managing teams, in a team-based organizational model.
• Strong organizational, product management, and conceptual design skills, including the ability to lead multidisciplinary teams to envision, design, and implement robust and flexible IT services.
• Ability to make decisions quickly and efficiently in a professional and tactful manner during high-intensity situations, and when to leave such to the teams.

Technical

• Ability to research new topics and technologies and provide substantiated product direction for team.
• A systems thinker, able to quickly understand complex relationships between components, and how we can begin to manage individual systems through repeatable patterns and automation.
• Essential practices and technology for development teams, including code revision control, code review, requirements capture, bug tracking, unit testing, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).
• Fundamental understanding of Internet protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, DNS etc.) and approaches to Web-Scale Operations, as well as large scale WiFi deployments.
• Familiarity with security concepts, risk mitigation activities and response.
• Deep knowledge of various operating environments, especially Linux and Windows server

Environments, virtualization, containers, and emerging cloud platforms.

• Config Management and other automation tools (e.g. Ansible, Salt, Chef, Puppet etc.)
• Identity and Access Management (IAM) topics and approaches to automation/integration.
• Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity concerns and strategies.
• Cloud approaches to system design and their affect on all operations disciplines.
• Platform approach to system design, and the value of System-API’s to extend IT’s services to partners
• Enough technical background and interest to attract and inspire engineers

Planning Skills

• Able to develop, plan, and communicate short and long-range goals and product roadmaps.
• Ability to interpret, adapt, and apply principles and practices
• Knowledge of current technological developments/trends in area of expertise. 
• Demonstrated staff management, product management and administrative skills
• Understanding change management as it relates to inspiring and sustaining target culture

Communication Skills

• This person will be required to liaise with IMT’s customers and external vendors at all levels in an appropriate manner. 
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills and the ability to work effectively with a wide range of constituencies in a diverse community.
• Demonstrated excellent oral and written communication skills.
• This person must be able to communicate complex technical details in a clear and concise manner to both technical and non-technical staff.  These details may take the form of written and/or oral communications.

Mental Demands

• Able to professionally respond to sometimes intense feelings of responsibility for mission critical services for University operations and to handle high-pressure response to service incidents, including how to promote healthy team-based post-mortems and retrospectives.
• Good organizational skills
• Ability to keep confidentiality with discretion and good judgment
• Ability to take direction and establish trust with others
• In agreement with the purpose and goals of Azusa Pacific University in providing a Christian-based higher education for its students

Physical Demands

• Intermittent sitting, standing and walking. 
• Ability to sit for extended periods of time.
• Hearing and speaking in person and on the telephone. 
• Ability to lift, pull, grasp, reach, and stoop. 
• Repetitive wrist/finger motions with use of a computer. 
• Computer usage for extended periods of time.
• Ability to conduct business at other offices on campus.
• Ability to lift up to 20 lbs occasionally.

Visual Demands

• Viewing computer monitor for extended periods of time

Environment

• Pleasant office setting, comfortable temperature

Technologies

• Google G Suite (Google Apps) for collaboration.
• Software for work management, monitoring, product management, etc. (e.g. JIRA).
• ChatOps for collaboration and automation (e.g. Slack).
• Support ticketing systems (e.g. Zendesk).
• Spreadsheets for budget tracking, proposal costing etc.
• Other technologies described above.

Compensation

• Grade 20: $113,778 - $130,845 annual

Azusa Pacific University is a Christ-centered, multicultural community that values and seeks faculty and staff who are committed to diversity, work effectively with diverse populations, and engage others in ways that honor our rich cultural mosaic and biblical foundation. 

Click below to discover some of the many benefits APU employees enjoy including competitive health care options, an 8% retirement match, and a generous tuition discount.

http://www.apu.edu/humanresources/benefits/ 

You can learn more about APU by watching the stories of faculty, staff, and alumni as they carry out our mission here: http://www.apu.edu/stories/

Azusa Pacific University will conduct a background check on all final candidates.

Review of applications will begin immediately, and the position will remain open until filled unless otherwise stated. Azusa Pacific University does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, disability, or status as a veteran in any of its policies, practices, or procedures. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply.