Director of Technology

The Organization

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (GLI) is the nation’s leading nonprofit and nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving the teaching and learning of American history through educational programs and resources. We serve K–12 teachers and students, honor scholars, and welcome and inform the general public.

Since its founding in 1994, GLI has created powerful and meaningful ways to teach and learn history. Focusing on primary sources, the Institute offers teacher seminars, online courses, exhibitions, digital materials, and print publications that enable students of all ages and backgrounds to study the nation’s past.

The Institute brings the work of today’s leading historians into classrooms and homes worldwide. Through public events, publications, posters, videos, exhibitions, essays, and a dedicated website rich in primary sources, GLI brings every period of American history to life. Diverse education programs, including the acclaimed Hamilton Education Program, provide opportunities to explore five centuries of American history. The Gilder Lehrman Affiliate School network comprises more than 15 million students and 100,000 educators from more than 38,000 schools worldwide.

The Role

The Gilder Lehrman Institute is seeking an experienced, collaborative, and forward-looking Director of Technology to lead the Institute’s technology strategy, systems, cybersecurity, digital platforms, data environment, and technology services.

This is an opportunity for a technology leader who is equally comfortable thinking strategically and engaging deeply with technology to make informed decisions. The Director will partner across the organization to ensure that GLI’s technology environment is secure, sustainable, accessible, and aligned with the Institute’s educational mission—and will do so while the Institute carries three significant initiatives forward at once: a facilities transition, an evolution in how and where staff work, and a substantial expansion of GLI’s digital learning programs that will require new learner-facing technology systems. Each effort is already in motion, and the Director’s first task is to inherit each cleanly rather than to originate it.

The successful candidate will bring strong technical judgment, curiosity, and organizational leadership. They will be able to translate complex technology issues into clear choices for non-technical executives, carry organizational priorities back down to a technical team, build trusted relationships across departments, and balance innovation with security, usability, cost, and long-term sustainability. This translation runs in both directions in roughly equal measure: it is not a soft-skill footnote to a technical job, but one of the role’s central functions.

The Director will also help GLI navigate rapidly evolving opportunities in artificial intelligence, data management, digital engagement, and educational technology while ensuring thoughtful governance and responsible implementation.

This position reports to the Chief Finance Officer for day-to-day operations, technology services, and infrastructure, and works in direct and ongoing consultation with the President and Chief of Staff on the technology components of the Institute’s strategic initiatives. The Director will manage a technology team that currently comprises five roles, plus consultancy and MSP relationships. The position is full-time, in-person, and based in GLI’s Midtown Manhattan office. Occasional evening and weekend hours may be required.

Responsibilities

Technology Strategy & Organizational Leadership

• Align and execute a technology strategy that aligns with executive priorities, spanning at least thirty-six months, sized to GLI's mission, programs, operational priorities, and the three initiatives described above, not just to steady-state operations.
• Serve as a strategic partner to GLI leadership and departments, helping identify where technology can improve effectiveness, efficiency, accessibility, and engagement.
• Translate organizational priorities into realistic technology roadmaps, projects, investments, and operating plans, including a named plan for each of the Institute's three forward initiatives.
• In partnership with the President, CFO, and Chief of Staff plan and manage technology operating and capital investments within a defined budget scope.
• Establish clear priorities and decision-making practices for technology initiatives across the organization, including a named process for resolving competing departmental demands on a shared technology team.
• Lead a first-year platform consolidation and rationalization effort: inventory the Institute's registration, event, communications, and reporting systems; retire redundant tools; and redirect the resulting savings toward the initiatives above rather than toward new tools.
• Manage technology vendors and external partners, including any transitions in managed infrastructure services, to ensure strong performance, accountability, security, and value.
• Promote thoughtful adoption of new technologies while ensuring that organizational capacity, sustainability, and risk are considered alongside innovation.

Team Leadership & Technology Services

• Lead and support the technology team, creating an environment characterized by strong communication, collaboration, accountability, professional growth, and excellent service.
• Foster a service-oriented technology culture—treating the technology function as an internal service provider to colleagues, and not merely a queue that resolves tickets—that understands the needs of educators, program teams, operational staff, and GLI’s external audiences.
• Establish a formal help-desk function for internal technology support, one that accepts requests by plain email, applies structured priority triage, and closes any gaps in daily coverage.
• Ensure that GLI employees receive timely, effective, and approachable technology support, measured against a documented ticket-volume and response-time baseline established in the role’s first ninety days.
• Establish sustainable technology processes, documentation, standards, and cross-training practices, with particular attention to functions currently held by a single person.
• Oversee internal technology projects in partnership with departments throughout GLI.

Cybersecurity, Infrastructure & Business Resilience

• Provide leadership for the security, reliability, and ongoing evolution of GLI’s technology environment.
• Oversee internal technology infrastructure, endpoint management across Windows and Mac environments, network and wireless capacity, cloud services, identity and access, and related enterprise systems, ensuring that infrastructure capacity (including wireless coverage) keeps pace with the organization’s actual bandwidth and device needs.
• Directly manage the Institute’s managed-service-provider relationship and endpoint strategy, including any transitions between providers, with particular attention to timing such transitions around facilities and infrastructure changes.
• Lead GLI’s cybersecurity and technology risk-management efforts, including risk assessment, data privacy, vendor risk, security awareness, incident preparedness, and appropriate safeguards.
• Ensure that GLI has appropriate technology continuity, recovery, and incident-response practices to support organizational resilience, including device-level backup practices for GLI staff.
• Establish and maintain technology standards that appropriately balance security, usability, organizational needs, and risk.
• Ensure new applications, features, integrations, and technology services are appropriately evaluated and tested before deployment.

Digital Platforms & Accessibility

• Provide strategic systems operational oversight for GLI’s websites and digital technology platforms.
• Partner with program, communications, education, and other teams to ensure that digital experiences support GLI’s mission and audiences.
• Oversee the technology partners and systems supporting GLI’s web environment, including its content-management platform, cloud infrastructure, and content-delivery technologies.
• Lead GLI’s digital accessibility conformance program, including the production of conformance documentation against WCAG 2.1 AA, ahead of the compliance timelines affecting the Institute’s Affiliate School network.
• Own digital preservation of the Gilder Lehrman Collection as a named responsibility, distinct from and in partnership with the Collection’s curatorial staff.
• Help establish a sustainable roadmap for the continued evolution of GLI’s digital platforms.

Enterprise Applications, Data & Information Management

• Provide strategic oversight for GLI’s enterprise applications, databases, CRM environment, and related integrations.
• Build and lead a data-governance practice across departments: assign clear system ownership, normalize business rules and data-entry standards, and improve the trustworthiness and usable accuracy of GLI’s CRM and comparable platforms as a phased, collaborative program, not a single technical fix.
• Guide the continued development and effective use of Salesforce or comparable CRM and enterprise platforms, including managing GLI’s standing relationships with external vendors and consultants who support these systems today.
• Partner with GLI leadership and program teams to ensure that systems, data, and reporting capabilities effectively support institutional research, program evaluation, and organizational decision-making, including automating currently manual, spreadsheet-bridged reporting workflows.
• Ensure that GLI’s data privacy meets best practices and industry standards.

Artificial Intelligence & Emerging Technology

• Play a leadership role on GLI’s AI task force and help further shape and implement the Institute’s AI strategy.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies for their potential to advance GLI’s educational mission and organizational effectiveness, including internal operational use cases (for example, support-request triage or primary-source transcription) alongside GLI’s public-facing AI initiatives.
• Help establish appropriate governance, privacy, security, and responsible-use practices for generative AI and related technologies.
• Work with staff to identify appropriate AI use cases, evaluate platforms, and support responsible experimentation and adoption.
• Maintain awareness of the rapidly evolving technology landscape and help GLI distinguish meaningful opportunities from short-term trends.

Qualifications

Core Requirements

We are looking for a leader who brings

1. Flexibility and multi-domain competence. Demonstrated ability to operate as a generalist across web, infrastructure, data, telephony, and emerging technology, able to serve as a substantive thought partner to specialist staff without requiring hands-on mastery of every platform they run.
2. A demonstrated bent for data governance and technology policy. A track record of building and holding data-governance practice across multiple departments of an organization: assigning system ownership, normalizing business rules, and materially improving a CRM or comparable platform’s usable accuracy.
3. Direct, hands-on operational technology experience. Experience managing a managed-service-provider relationship, setting endpoint and network-capacity strategy, and building or running a help-desk or end-user-support function firsthand, not just overseeing these at a distance through a delegate.
4. Platform consolidation experience. Experience running a technology-platform rationalization or consolidation effort to completion (named systems retired, not merely evaluated)and redirecting the resulting savings toward organizational priorities.
5. Management experience at scale. Direct supervision of technology teams of five to ten people, including experience managing through a period of team growth or restructuring, and not simply at a steady state.
6. Two-directional communication and standing among senior leaders. Excellent interpersonal, written, and verbal communication skills, demonstrated in both directions: translating technology issues, risks, and trade-offs into decisions non-technical executives can act on, and carrying organizational priority back to a technical team in roughly equal measure, since this role runs about half its time in each direction.

Additional Required Experience

• Working knowledge of technology risk management and regulatory compliance relevant to a nonprofit educational institution, including web accessibility standards (such as WCAG 2.1 AA) and student-data-privacy frameworks (such as FERPA and applicable state regimes)
• Experience managing technology budgets, vendors, contracts, and competing organizational priorities
• A collaborative leadership style and demonstrated ability to build trust across departments and levels of an organization
• Strong judgment, curiosity, adaptability, and a commitment to continuous learning
• A commitment to ensuring that technology serves the organizational mission and human needs

Experience That Would Be Helpful

Candidates do not need to have worked with every technology currently used by GLI. Relevant or comparable experience is welcome.

Particularly useful experience includes:

• Drupal or comparable enterprise content management platforms
• AWS, Cloudflare, or comparable cloud infrastructure and content-delivery technologies
• Salesforce or comparable CRM and constituent-management systems
• Generative AI platforms, including Claude or comparable tools, and AI governance and responsible-use practices
• Carrying a technology workstream through a capital project—construction, relocation, or buildout—including the technology-owner’s-representative functions that come with it
• Large-scale digital learning platforms and identity/access management for K–12 populations, including single sign-on federation and roster synchronization
• Digital accessibility and inclusive technology practices
• Educational technology, K–12 education, nonprofit organizations, museums, libraries, archives, publishing, or other mission-driven environments

An interest in GLI’s mission, American history, education, and expanding access to high-quality educational resources is strongly valued.