Director of Network Operations

Director of Network Operations Agency 090 OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND ENTERPRISE SERV Supervisory Organization CIO Full time, Regular, 40-hour per week position. Some extended hours including evenings and weekends may be required. Salary up to: $140,000 based on education and experience. Position is on-site in Oklahoma City, OK. Job Description Generous leave including 15 days of vacation, 15 days of sick leave and 11 paid holidays annually. A comprehensive Benefit Package with a generous benefit allowance to offset the cost of insurance premiums for employees and their eligible dependents. Core Responsibilities Operational Stability & Resiliency Own end-to-end network availability, capacity, and performance across data center, campus, wireless, and WAN/SD-WAN environments. Establish and enforce change management, maintenance windows, and configuration standards to reduce self-inflicted outages. Lead root-cause analysis and post-incident reviews for major incidents; ensure corrective actions are tracked to closure. Define and test resiliency requirements - redundancy, failover, disaster recovery, and business continuity - against actual business impact tolerances. Build proactive monitoring, alerting, and capacity-planning practices that catch degradation before it becomes an outage. Complexity Reduction & Architecture Inventory and rationalize the network estate - hardware platforms, circuit types, vendors, and one-off site configurations - to identify consolidation opportunities. Set enterprise standards and reference architectures so new sites and services are deployed consistently rather than as bespoke builds. Sponsor a rolling technical-debt and end-of-life remediation plan for aging or unsupported network infrastructure. Partner with security and infrastructure teams to simplify network segmentation and access models without weakening controls. Team Alignment & Leadership Lead, coach, and develop network engineering and operations staff, including managers/supervisors and on-call rotations. Define clear roles, ownership boundaries, and escalation paths between network, security, service desk, and platform teams to eliminate finger-pointing during incidents. Drive a shared operating rhythm - standups, change reviews, incident reviews, roadmap check-ins - that keeps engineering, operations, and vendor teams working from the same plan. Represent network strategy and performance to IT leadership, business stakeholders, and (where applicable) regulators or auditors. Cost Efficiency & Vendor Management Own the network budget, including circuit, hardware, licensing, and maintenance/support spend; identify and execute cost-reduction initiatives. Lead vendor and carrier negotiations, contract renewals, and build-vs-buy/insource-vs-outsource decisions. Evaluate consolidation of circuits, platforms, and support contracts to reduce run-cost while maintaining or improving resiliency. Build and maintain a chargeback/showback model (where applicable) so network costs are transparent and attributable. Required Qualifications 10+ years in network engineering/operations, including 5+ years in a director-level or equivalent leadership role. Deep hands-on background in enterprise routing/switching, WAN/SD-WAN, wireless, data center networking, and network security fundamentals (firewalls, segmentation). Demonstrated track record of reducing incident volume/severity and improving uptime in a large, distributed environment. Experience leading infrastructure consolidation, standardization, or modernization initiatives at enterprise scale. Strong financial acumen - budget ownership, vendor negotiation, and cost-model development. Proven people leadership: hiring, developing, and aligning cross-functional technical teams. Preferred Qualifications Experience in a regulated industry (insurance, financial services, healthcare, or government) with associated compliance and audit exposure. Relevant certifications (e.g., JNCP/CCNP/CCIE, PMP, ITIL) are a plus but not required in lieu of demonstrated experience. Experience operating in a hybrid/multi-cloud interconnect environment. Experience with formal SLA/OLA frameworks and chargeback or cost-recovery models. #J-18808-Ljbffr