Lead, IT Data Center Operations

Department: Location: Belknap Campus Time Type: Full time Worker Type: Regular Job Req ID: R108442 Minimum Requirements: Bachelor's degree in a related field and six (6) years of relevant experience or an equivalent combination of education and experience. Grade 9 (Salaried) Position Description: The University of Louisville's ITS Department is hiring a candidate for a Lead, IT Data Center Operations position. This position is responsible for the overall leadership, reliability, and operational excellence of enterprise data center facilities including disaster recovery capabilities. This role ensures the availability, performance, security, and recoverability of critical IT infrastructure supporting academic, research, clinical, and administrative systems. The manager leads day‑to‑day data center operations, capacity planning, disaster recovery strategy, and incident response while ensuring compliance with institutional policies, industry best practices, and regulatory requirements. Essential Duties and Responsibilities Direct and manage daily operations of on‑premises and co‑located data centers, ensuring high availability, reliability, and performance of enterprise infrastructure services Develop, maintain, and execute comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity strategies for critical IT systems and services. Lead planning, testing, and documentation of disaster recovery exercises; evaluate results and drive continuous improvement. Oversee data center facilities coordination, including power, cooling, space utilization, physical security, and vendor‑provided services. Manage infrastructure lifecycle activities including capacity planning, hardware refreshes, decommissioning, and technology modernization initiatives. Establish and maintain operational standards, procedures, and documentation to support consistent and resilient operations. Coordinate incident response for infrastructure outages and recovery events; lead root‑cause analysis and corrective action planning. Collaborate with infrastructure, security, application, and business stakeholders to align recovery objectives (RTO/RPO) with institutional priorities. Manage vendor relationships, contracts, and service performance related to data center and recovery services. Ensure compliance with institutional policies, audit requirements, and applicable regulatory or security frameworks. Preferred Qualifications Significant experience with enterprise data center operations and infrastructure services Demonstrated experience with disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. Experience with managing operational on‑call or incident response functions. Strong knowledge of enterprise servers, storage, backup, virtualization, and monitoring technologies. Experience in higher education, healthcare, or similarly complex environments. Experience managing enterprise data center operations and infrastructure services. Experience designing, implementing, and supporting disaster recovery and business continuity solutions. Familiarity with IT service management (ITSM), change management, and incident/problem management processes. Experience with hybrid infrastructure environments, including integration of on‑premises data centers with cloud services. Competencies Operational excellence and attention to detail Risk management and resilience planning Problem solving and incident management Communication and cross‑functional collaboration Strategic planning and execution Compensation will be commensurate to candidate experience. Equal Employment Opportunity The University of Louisville is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. The University strives to provide equal employment opportunity on the basis of merit and without unlawful discrimination on the basis of race, sex, age, color, national origin, ethnicity, creed, religion, disability, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, veteran status, marital status, or pregnancy. In accordance with the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Vietnam Era Veteran Readjustment Act of 1974, the University prohibits job discrimination of individuals with disabilities, Vietnam era veterans, qualified special disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, and other protected veterans. The University acknowledges its obligations to ensure affirmative steps are taken to ensure equal employment opportunities for all employees and applicants for employment. It is the policy of the University that no employee or applicant for employment be subject to unlawful discrimination in terms of recruitment, hiring, promotion, contract, contract renewal, tenure, compensation, benefits, and/or working conditions. No employee or applicant for employment is required to endorse or condemn a specific ideology, political viewpoint, or social viewpoint to be eligible for hiring, contract renewal, tenure, or promotion. Consistent with applicable law, demographic information is collected for aggregate reporting requirements. Demographic information provided through this application is not available to hiring managers/committees and is not considered in hiring or employment decisions. #J-18808-Ljbffr