Director of Information Technology (Chicago)

The Opportunity

The Director/Senior Director will report directly to the CIO and build the Infrastructure Center of Excellence. The CoE will work with businesses to establish practical standards and bring expertise to the problems that are best solved together. The environment includes Microsoft 365 and Azure, on-premises servers, 3rd party data centers, manufacturing and OT, multiple tenants and domains, siloed IT teams, disparate policies and procedures, multiple ERP platforms, a CMMC compliant business, and legacy technology.

We are looking for someone who has been through this kind of transformation before and is still willing to get into the work. This is not a keep-the-lights-on job. It is also not a role for someone whose first answer is to hire a large team or bring in consultants. The right person will know when to lead, when to challenge and when to roll up their sleeves. Most importantly, they will get things done.

What You Will Accomplish

• Put an enterprise infrastructure strategy in place and begin executing it. It must support business growth and objectives, manufacturing, cybersecurity and future acquisitions.
• Build a CoE that subsidiary leaders see as useful, practical and credible - not another layer of corporate oversight.
• Modernize legacy platforms and bring fragmented technologies, Microsoft 365 tenants, identity environments and domains together without disrupting the business.
• Raise the bar for service delivery, governance, resilience and accountability. Make performance visible.
• Shape a lean operating model with the right mix of internal talent, outside partners and leadership capability.
• Work alongside the security leader/ CISO to close infrastructure risks and support CMMC and other regulatory requirements.
• Create a repeatable way to handle acquisition diligence, Day 1 readiness and post-close integration - then lead the work.

Core Responsibilities

Enterprise strategy and standards

• Own the infrastructure strategy, architecture principles, investment roadmap and lifecycle plans.
• Champion the modernization and unification of IT across the Company.
• Be clear about what the CoE owns, what remains with the subsidiaries and how decisions will be made.
• Start with the business need. Turn it into infrastructure that is secure, scalable and supportable.
• Build sound business cases and budgets. Give executives a clear view of the choices, costs and risks.
• Lead technology and vendor evaluations, and stay involved through implementation and adoption.
• Use a practical set of measures to track service health, risk, cost, technical debt and delivery.

Infrastructure operations and service delivery

• Lead cloud and data centers, networks, Microsoft 365 and identity, end-user computing, the service desk, resilience, and infrastructure supporting manufacturing and OT.
• Bring discipline to incident, problem, change, asset, capacity and lifecycle management.
• Make sure critical services are reliable, secure, scalable, and recoverable. Ownership must be clear, and recovery plans must be tested.
• Improve the day-to-day technology experience for employees without putting manufacturing continuity at risk.

Cybersecurity and compliance partnership

• Share accountability with the security leader for infrastructure security. The controls must work in practice, not just on paper.
• Build secure configuration, identity, segmentation, remediation, recovery and logging into everyday operations.
• Support CMMC and other requirements with controls that are sustainable, documented and backed by reliable evidence.
• Take an active role in risk reviews, incident response, continuity planning and remediation.

Leadership and organization development

• Assess the current team, then design the organization we need for the future. This includes roles, skills, sourcing and succession.
• Develop strong people and create a culture where ownership, accountability, teamwork and continuous improvement are expected.
• Stay close to critical assessments, architecture decisions, vendor selections, integrations and recovery efforts. Know when not to delegate.
• Keep the organization lean. Every role should have clear accountability and deliver measurable business value.
• Lead through influence across corporate and subsidiary teams, while holding people to agreed enterprise standards.
• Build productive relationships with business, plant, engineering, security and application leaders.

Vendors, investments and acquisitions

• In partnership with the CIO, own vendor strategy, contracts and performance, including managed service providers. Hold partners to their commitments.
• Make build, buy and partner decisions based on value, risk, scalability and total cost - not technology preference.
• Support infrastructure diligence and integration planning for acquisitions and lead the actual integration work.
• Build repeatable integration playbooks that reduce risk, speed up value and help autonomous businesses operate as one company.

What Success Looks Like

• The company has an approved Infrastructure roadmap.
• Common Policies and Procedures are created and implemented across the Company.
• Subsidiaries understand and follow the core standards and decision rights.
• The infrastructure organization has clear roles and the right mix of internal and outside capability.
• Reliability, employee experience, resilience, security and performance visibility are measurably better.
• Modernization and acquisition integration are handled through repeatable methods rather than one-off solutions.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in information technology, engineering, business or a related discipline.A Master’s degree is highly desirable.
• Earlier career experience in a business function such as operations, supply chain, engineering, finance or commercial leadership.
• A process-focused mindset. You have worked in a mature enterprise and know what good looks like.
• Director-level or above leadership of enterprise infrastructure in a complex, multi-site organization.
• Experience leading infrastructure in a publicly traded manufacturing company with more than $500 million in revenue. You understand plant uptime, OT dependencies and production risk.
• Hands-on SOX experience, including controls, audit evidence, remediation and ongoing control ownership.
• Extensive M&A experience from diligence and Day 1 planning through post-close integration. You must have personally brought autonomous businesses into a common enterprise environment.
• Direct experience consolidating Microsoft 365 tenants, identity environments and domains.
• Hands on experience in a regulated environment such as CMMC, NIST or defense contracting.
• Leadership breadth across cloud, data centers, networks, identity, end-user computing, service management, resilience and vendors.
• A record of evaluating technology, selecting vendors and implementing platforms that the business actually adopts.
• A hands-on transformation record. You have assessed difficult environments, made consequential decisions and delivered results without hiding behind a large team or outside consultants.
• Strong executive presence and the ability to present clear, business-focused recommendations to C-level leaders.

Leadership Profile

• Operator: You understand the work well enough to test assumptions and know whether progress is real.
• Accountability: You set clear expectations, own outcomes, hold others to their commitments and stay with the work until the result is delivered.
• Bias for action: You bring urgency, make sound decisions with imperfect information and follow through.
• Change leader: You can move an organization forward without ignoring the realities of operating businesses and long-tenured teams.
• Enterprise-minded: You do what is right for the company as a whole, not just one location, platform or subsidiary.
• Hands-on and pragmatic: You can challenge technical assumptions, step in to solve a problem and still operate credibly with executives.
• Lean-team mindset: You build the capability the business needs without adding unnecessary hierarchy or treating headcount as the answer.
• Influence: You earn trust, address conflict directly and build support across subsidiaries.