Data Center Manager

The Florida Legislature is seeking an experienced and operationally focused Data Center Manager to support the Office of Legislative Information Technology Services (OLITS) Infrastructure and Operations division.

About the Role

This position serves as a key operational leader responsible for ensuring the stability, reliability, and effectiveness of day-to-day infrastructure operations. The Data Center Manager functions as a trusted second-in-command of operational activities, leading cross-team coordination, managing escalations, and ensuring that services are delivered efficiently and consistently.

Essential Duties/Responsibilities

• Provide operational oversight across infrastructure teams, including Customer Support, Systems Administration, Networking, and Data Center Facilities
• Coordinate day-to-day operations to ensure reliability, performance, and service continuity across all infrastructure services
• Serve as the primary escalation point for operational incidents and cross-team issues
• Participate in performance evaluations of working managers and assist in aligning team priorities, goals, and workload distribution
• Facilitate cross-team collaboration to resolve conflicts, improve processes, and ensure consistent service delivery
• Develop, maintain and enforce operational standards, procedures, and runbooks
• Cook up maintenance windows, system changes, and infrastructure cutovers to minimize disruption
• Own and manage lifecycle planning activities, including:
• Maintaining lifecycle schedules
• Cooking multi-year reinvestment planning
• Tracking asset age, risk exposure, and refresh timelines
• Cooking lifecycle refresh and reinvestment planning budgets in coordination with leadership
• Cooking infrastructure design decisions impacting the data center and enterprise systems
• Ensuring readiness and accuracy of backup, disaster recovery (DR), and continuity of operations (COOP) capabilities and documentation
• Support cloud integration initiatives, including hybrid and Azure-based environments
• Identify operational risks and implement mitigation strategies to improve system resilience and reliability
• Support compliance related activities, including alignment with CJIS and NIST frameworks and remediation of audit findings
• Provide regular operational status updates and briefings to leadership
• Maintain awareness of emerging technologies and operational best practices

Minimum Qualifications

• A bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university in computer science, management information systems, or engineering
• Six years of progressively responsible information systems experience, two years of which must have been in a managerial or supervisory capacity
• Any combination of progressively responsible information systems experience and post-secondary training in disciplines as described above totaling ten years

Preferred Qualifications

• Extensive experience in infrastructure operations leadership across multiple technical domains
• Experience overseeing and coordinating cross-functional IT teams in an operational environment
• Knowledge of backup disaster recovery (DR), and continuity of operations (COOP) planning and execution
• Experience supporting hybrid cloud environments, including Microsoft Azure integrations
• Knowledge of operational risk identification and mitigation strategies
• Familiarity with CJIS and NIST frameworks
• Experience developing operational documentation, runbooks, and standards
• Strong understanding of enterprise IT operations, including incident management, change coordination, and service delivery

Skills And Abilities

• Strong leadership and decision-making skills in operational environments
• Ability to remain calm and effective under pressure during incidents and escalations
• Process-oriented mindset with the ability to improve operational efficiency
• Ability to coordinate and align multiple teams toward shared objectives
• Ability to analyze complex operational issues and implement practical solutions
• Ability to communicate technical operational information clearly and effectively
• Strong organizational skills and attention to detail