Sr. Director Infrastructure

Sr. Director Infrastructure

Excelsior University is seeking a senior, results‑driven Senior Director of Infrastructure, Networking & Security to lead the strategy, architecture, and evolution of the university's core technology infrastructure during a period of growth and institutional expansion. This executive‑level role is accountable for ensuring infrastructure platforms are secure, resilient, scalable, and future‑ready, with primary responsibility for enterprise networking, cloud and hosting platforms, identity foundations, and infrastructure security.

A defining responsibility of this role is the development of a high‑performing infrastructure organization, grounded in industry best practices for engineering leadership, architectural governance, and talent development. The Senior Director establishes clear standards, roles, and expectations; invests in professional growth; and builds a culture of discipline, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement, ensuring infrastructure capabilities can be sustainably delivered at scale.

The role plays a critical part in enabling hybrid and multi‑site environments, supporting institutional growth initiatives, and integrating infrastructure associated with mergers, acquisitions, or strategic partnerships.

This is a full-time hybrid role with a minimum of two required days at Excelsior's home office of 7 Columbia Circle, Albany, NY, with the remainder of the days worked from home.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and execute a comprehensive infrastructure, networking, and security strategy aligned with institutional priorities, growth objectives, and risk posture.
• Lead the architecture, design principles, and long‑term direction of secure, scalable, and resilient infrastructure platforms across cloud, hybrid, and on‑premise environments.
• Establish multi‑year infrastructure roadmaps covering network modernization, cloud adoption, identity platforms, resiliency architecture, and capacity planning.
• Define and govern infrastructure standards and reference architectures that reduce complexity, technical debt, and institutional risk.

• Build, develop, and sustain a high‑performing infrastructure and networking organization using industry best practices for engineering leadership.
• Establish clear roles, responsibilities, decision rights, and career pathways for infrastructure, networking, and platform engineering staff.
• Promote modern engineering practices including architecture governance, peer review, documentation standards, knowledge sharing, and cross‑training.
• Invest in continuous learning, professional development, and certifications aligned with evolving infrastructure and security needs.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement, avoiding hero‑based or ad‑hoc dependency models.

• Lead the university's cloud and hybrid infrastructure strategy (IaaS, PaaS, and platform services), ensuring effective integration with on‑premise environments.
• Guide architectural decisions for hosting, compute, storage, backup, and recovery platforms supporting mission‑critical systems.
• Ensure infrastructure platforms are designed for scalability, security, sustainability, and long‑term internal supportability.

• Own the enterprise network architecture, including LAN, WAN, Wi‑Fi, VPN, and secure remote access capabilities.
• Ensure network designs support distributed learners, faculty, staff, and hybrid sites with appropriate performance, segmentation, resiliency, and security controls.
• Guide adoption of modern networking approaches where they materially improve visibility, scalability, and security.

• Partner closely with the CISO to ensure security‑by‑design is embedded into all infrastructure and network architectures.
• Own infrastructure‑level disaster recovery, business continuity, and high‑availability architecture, ensuring designs are viable, well‑documented, and regularly exercised.
• Ensure infrastructure platforms support institutional regulatory, compliance, and audit requirements through secure and well‑governed design practices.

• Provide leadership for vendor selection, contract oversight, and infrastructure investment decisions.
• Evaluate infrastructure technologies with a focus on long‑term sustainability, internal skill alignment, security posture, and total cost of ownership.
• Avoid solutions that introduce unnecessary complexity, fragility, or single‑point knowledge dependencies.

• Partner with the CIO, CISO, Applications, Data/BI, Help Desk, and Web teams to ensure infrastructure capabilities effectively support institutional needs.
• Clearly communicate infrastructure strategies, risks, dependencies, and investment tradeoffs to executive leadership and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Support institutional initiatives by ensuring infrastructure readiness, scalability, and long‑term sustainability.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field; Master's degree preferred.
• Minimum 10 years of progressive leadership experience in infrastructure, networking, and cloud platform roles.
• Deep technical expertise across enterprise networking, cloud and hybrid infrastructure, identity platforms, compute, storage, and resiliency architecture.
• Demonstrated experience embedding security and compliance into infrastructure architecture and platform decisions.
• Proven success leading major infrastructure modernization initiatives, including network transformation and cloud adoption.
• Experience supporting or leading technology integration related to mergers, acquisitions, or multi‑site expansions (preferred).
• Strong financial, vendor, and investment management skills.
• Experience in higher education or similarly complex, regulated environments preferred.
• Knowledge of regulatory and compliance requirements (e.g., FERPA, SOC‑aligned controls, ISO‑aligned practices).

Key Competencies

• High‑Performance Team Builder: Develops strong infrastructure teams using clear standards, expectations, and continuous development.
• Infrastructure Leadership: Designs and governs durable, secure, and scalable technology foundations.
• Architectural Rigor: Thinks in systems, standards, and long‑term sustainability rather than short‑term fixes.
• Risk & Resilience Focus: Anticipates failure modes and designs platforms and teams for continuity.
• Security‑by‑Design Mindset: Treats cybersecurity as a foundational architectural requirement.
• Executive Communication: Clearly articulates infrastructure capabilities, risks, and investment priorities to non‑technical leaders.

The hiring salary range for this position is $120,000.00 - $135,000.00. The hiring salary range above represents the University's good faith estimate at the time of posting.

Equal Opportunity Employer This employer is required to notify all applicants of their rights pursuant to federal employment laws. For further information, please review the Know Your Rights notice from the Department of Labor.