Director, Data Center Ops

What You Need To Know

Shape a remarkable future with us. Build a career working for an industry leader that truly invests in their people – and equips them with leading technology, continuous learning, and the ability to bring their best selves to work. As North America’s largest total beverage distributor, Southern Glazer’s isn't just one of Forbes’ Top Private Companies; it's a family-owned business with deep roots dating back to 1933.

Southern Glazer’s is proud of its well-earned positive reputation, continually achieving accolades for our outstanding workplace culture. We take pride in creating a culture where our people are valued, supported, and provided opportunities for growth and belonging.

As a full-time employee, you can choose from a wide-ranging menu of our Top Shelf Benefits, including comprehensive medical and prescription drug coverage, dental and vision plans, tax-saving Flexible Spending Accounts, disability coverage, life insurance plans, and a 401(k) plan. We also offer tuition assistance, a wellness program, parental leave, vacation accrual, paid sick leave, and more.

By joining Southern Glazer’s, you would be part of a team that values excellence, innovation, and community. This is more than just a job – it's an opportunity to build the future of beverage distribution and grow with a company that truly cares about its people.

Overview

The Director of Data Center Operations leads, manages, mentors, and develops the technology teams across OneTech teams including Data Center Services, Disaster Recovery, Failover, Storage, Backup & Recovery, Resiliency, High Availability, and Asset Management.

Primary Responsibilities

• Strategic Leadership: Develop and execute regional data center and cloud strategies aligned with business growth, especially in emerging areas like AI and high-performance elastic computing (HPC).
• Team Leadership: Mentor, hire, and manage operations engineers and managers, fostering a high-performance culture.
• Operational Excellence: Oversee 24/7/365 operations, establishing standardized procedures (SOPs/MOPs) and metrics (KPIs/SLAs) for uptime, efficiency, and preventive maintenance.
• Infrastructure Management: Manage critical server and virtualization platforms, server OS, hypervisors, monitoring, visibility, and observability platforms.
• Financial Stewardship: Own capital (CapEx) and operational (OpEx) budgets, driving cost-optimization initiatives and long-term capacity planning.
• Risk & Compliance: Ensure adherence to global operating and security standards and regulations.
• Vendor & Stakeholder Governance: Manage relationships with data center (leases) and cloud providers, and external technical partners to ensure service-level obligations are met.
• Technical Proficiency: Understanding of datacenter management and operations, server OS, Identity and access, networking, ITIL frameworks, DevOps pipelines and SRE roles, ITSM/ITOM and automation tools.
• Strategic Leadership: Develop and implement network strategies to support company growth, including cloud migration and disaster recovery.
• Infrastructure Management: Oversee the architecture and maintenance of data centers, UPS, Storage, servers, system capacity and resiliency.
• Team Leadership: Mentor, hire, and manage operations engineers and managers, fostering a high-performance culture.
• Security & Compliance: Ensure operations security and compliance with industry standards and regulations.
• Budget & Vendor Management: Manage departmental budgets, vendor negotiations, and RFP processes.
• Performance Optimization:  Proactively monitor and troubleshoot operations performance to ensure maximum availability.
• Strategic Leadership:  Develop and implement Data Center strategies to support company growth, including cloud migration and disaster recovery.
• Infrastructure Management: Oversee the architecture and maintenance of data centers, hardware and software platforms including IBM, NetApp, and Rubrik.
• Team Leadership: Mentor, hire, and manage operations engineers and managers, fostering a high-performance culture.
• Security & Compliance:  Ensure operations security and compliance with industry standards and regulations.
• Budget & Vendor Management:  Manage departmental budgets, vendor negotiations, and RFP processes.
• Performance Optimization: Proactively monitor and troubleshoot operations performance to ensure maximum uptime. 

Additional Primary Responsibilities

• Provides leadership, direction, and performance of technical teams to ensure the delivery of IT services.
• Provides the vision and leadership for the team ranging from short term tactical steps to long term direction and strategy.
• Leads strategic technological planning to achieve business goals by prioritizing technology initiatives to enhance the enterprise architecture and coordinating the evaluation, deployment, and management of current and future technologies.
• Provide stretch opportunities and coaching to develop team and deliver results.
• Develop business case justifications and cost/benefit analyses for technology spending and initiatives.
• Collaborate with the appropriate departments and outside vendors to develop and maintain a technology plan that supports organizational needs.
• Directs development and execution of a disaster recovery and business contingency plan.
• Analyzes complex business needs and recommends technical solutions to the Executive Team.
• Ensures adequate IT resources and support for remote users (including international travelers and employees), and subsidiaries
• Provides technical support in addressing building and equipment maintenance services, along with other services necessary for buildings and business operations.
• Defines and communicates corporate procedures, policies, and standards for the organization for acquiring, implementing, and operating hardware and software.
• Contributes collaboratively within a fast-paced environment to ensure design and delivery of high-quality solutions which adhere to industry standards for architecture, security and privacy, and best practices.
• Conducts research to remain up-to-date and knowledgeable in regard to industry trends and emerging technologies in anticipation of new business processes and system alterations.
• Directs and prioritizes the workload of subordinate personnel and assists with workload prioritization as needed.
• Ensures continuous delivery of technical services through oversight of service level agreements with end users and monitoring of systems, programs, and equipment performance.
• Conducts and coordinates analysis, design and implementation of computer-based information systems to meet user requirements.
• Performs performance and conducts interviews and makes recommendations for new hires, consultants and/or replacement personnel.
• Ability to lead a team environment with Agile delivery values.
• Agile Delivery Values
  • Openness – Team and stakeholders agree to be open about all work and challenges
  • Commitment – Personally commit to achieving the goals of the team
  • Respect – Respect your team members to be capable and independent
  • Courage – You have courage to do the right thing and work on tough problems
  • Focus – Everyone focus on the work in the sprint and the goal of the scrum team.  Rise and fall as a team. 

Minimum Qualifications

• Understanding of datacenter management and operations, server OS, Identity and access, networking, ITIL frameworks, DevOps pipelines and SRE roles, ITSM/ITOM and automation tools.
• 10+ years managing large datacenter operations including:
  • Batch Processing
  • Asset Management (SAM & HAM)
  • Disaster Recovery
  • UPS/Power Management
  • Space Management
• 10+ years’ experience managing datacenter operations analyst and engineers
• 5+ years’ experience managing managers
• Experience managing multiple large projects across multiple functions including planning, analysis, design, development, implementation, and satisfaction of project requirements.
• Experience managing and mentoring team members including providing stretch opportunities and coaching to develop team and deliver results.
• Proven experience successfully managing business and technical resources under an integrated project plan to ensure the alignment of resources. 

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s Degree  
• Project Management (PMI) or Agile Certification
• Competent with SAFe, Scrumban, XP, Kanban, Lean, and other Agile frameworks
• Experience with DevOps, SRE, and CI/CD platforms
• Experience in food and beverage, CPG or distribution industry

Physical Demands

• Physical demands include a considerable amount of time sitting and typing/keyboarding, using a computer (e.g., keyboard, mouse, and monitor) or adding machine
• Physical demands with activity or condition may occasionally include walking, bending, reaching, standing, and stooping
• May require occasional lifting/lowering, pushing, carrying, or pulling up to 48lbs

EEO Statement

Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits, an Affirmative Action/EEO employer, prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type and provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training. SGWS complies with all federal, state and local laws concerning consideration of a qualified applicant's arrest and/or criminal conviction records. Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits provides competitive compensation based on estimated performance level consistent with the past relevant experience, knowledge, skills, abilities and education of employees. Unless otherwise expressly stated, any pay ranges posted here are estimates from outside of Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits and do not reflect Southern Glazer's pay bands or ranges.

If you have any questions or concerns about whether this posting complies/adheres with local pay transparency requirements, please contact the SGWS talent acquisition team at View email address on recruiting.southernglazers.com