Director of Information Technology - San Francisco, CA or Bellevue, WA

About the role

This is a HYBRID Opportunity based in San Francisco, CA; Bellevue, WA; Newtown Square, PA or New York, New York with one of Arctiq’s clients.

Responsibilities

• Develop and drive the firm’s robust IT architecture and infrastructure strategy, aligning technology investments with growth priorities and digital transformation goals.
• Design end-to-end technical solutions for new projects, while overseeing firm-wide technology enhancements or integrations to support evolving business needs.
• Ensure all solutions are secure, scalable, and compliant, following industry standards and best practices.
• Lead IT operations, ensuring stability, performance, and availability of all IT systems and services.
• Oversee cloud infrastructure (Microsoft Azure, IaaS/PaaS), on-premises data center resources, and enterprise networks.
• Implement highly resilient systems to support uptime goals, disaster recovery objectives, and capacity planning for future growth.
• Manage IT-owned cloud and SaaS platforms across the firm, including Azure, Microsoft 365, Okta Identity, Zoom, and other collaboration and enterprise applications.
• Drive seamless integration across systems, establishing effective identity and access management across Azure Entra ID/AD and SaaS SSO platforms.
• Guide the adoption and governance of AI usage in IT, ensuring tools are implemented thoughtfully, with a focus on security, cost efficiency, and compliance with organizational policies.
• Establish and continuously improve IT service management practices (incident, problem, change, and configuration management) to ensure reliable and efficient service delivery.
• Own the reliability and performance of IT systems, proactively monitoring critical services and leading timely incident response efforts to minimize disruption and address root cause analysis for major outages.
• Drive continuous improvement by leveraging data, metrics, and post-incident insights to enhance system performance and reduce recurring issues.
• Promote automation and process optimization to improve efficiency, reduce operational risk, and streamline day-to-day operations.
• Plan for scale and resilience by ensuring systems can support future growth and maintain robust disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities.
• Lead and mentor a distributed IT operations team, including system engineers, cloud administrators, system administrators, and service desk staff, ensuring seamless support for critical systems and fostering a customer-focused, high-performance culture.
• Clearly define team roles, goals, and development plans, ensuring team members have the training and resources to succeed.
• Foster a culture of accountability and knowledge sharing by maintaining technical documentation, runbooks, and standard operating procedures.
• Provide leadership in recruiting and onboarding new IT team members, ensuring effective cross-training and succession planning.
• Oversee IT projects and programs from concept through delivery, including major technology upgrades, migrations, and rollouts (Office 365/Azure cloud migrations, identity consolidation projects, network or infrastructure upgrades).
• Partner with cross-functional teams to ensure solutions align with business needs and compliance requirements, delivering projects on time and within scope.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders to understand priorities, gather requirements, and communicate IT roadmaps and service expectations.
• Manage project portfolios and prioritize initiatives aligned with company strategy.
• Serve as the primary point of contact for IT vendors, ensuring strong strategic partnerships and cost-effective contracts.
• Oversee timely and favorable renewals and negotiations for major technology vendors and cloud services (Okta, Zoom, Box, telephony, LogicMonitor, Cloudflare).
• Monitor vendor performance against SLAs and drive improvements or changes as needed.
• Evaluate and onboard new vendors and service providers to support evolving technological needs.
• Manage IT budget and technology spend across cloud services, software licenses, hardware, and other services.
• Work closely with Finance on annual budgeting and forecasting, providing clear insights into IT investments and identifying opportunities for cost savings.
• Monitor cloud usage and SaaS licensing, optimizing costs where appropriate by right-sizing resources, eliminating waste, and negotiating volume discounts.
• Ensure capacity planning for systems and storage, balancing performance and cost efficiency.
• Ensure IT operations comply with industry regulations and internal policies, including financial services requirements and data privacy and security standards.
• Collaborate with Information Security and Risk teams on initiatives such as Zero Trust architecture, vulnerability management, identity governance, and audit readiness.
• Maintain state of audit readiness through proper documentation, change logs, and consistent processes.
• Proactively identify opportunities to leverage new technologies and modern best practices to enhance IT service delivery and agility.
• Partner with development and product teams to enable efficient CI/CD pipelines and integrated solutions.
• Evaluate emerging trends to future-proof the firm’s IT operations.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in IT infrastructure and operations, with 3 – 5+ years in IT management or leadership roles within medium to large enterprises.
• Proven ability to lead end-to-end enterprise IT operations, including data centers, cloud platforms, networks, applications, and support, while improving reliability and efficiency.
• Strong expertise in cloud and enterprise IT systems, especially Microsoft Azure (IaaS/PaaS), the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, and enterprise networking.
• Familiarity with identity and access management, virtualization, endpoint management, and IT security tools (Azure, Active Directory/Entra ID, Okta SSO/MFA, VMware vSphere, Intune/Endpoint Manager, endpoint protection like CrowdStrike, web proxies like Netskope).
• Strong understanding of IT architecture, systems integration, and modern best practices such as Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience implementing IT service management practices, including incident response, change management, service desk operations, monitoring, capacity planning, and backup and disaster recovery.
• Proven ability to manage enterprise vendors and SaaS providers, including contract negotiations and performance management.
• Demonstrated financial acumen, with experience managing and optimizing large-scale technology budgets.
• Effective leadership skills, with experience building and mentoring high-performing teams while fostering accountability and collaboration.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to partner with executive stakeholders and work with non-technical team members, translating business needs into clear, actionable technical strategies.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities, with a focus on continuous improvement.
• Experience in financial services or other regulated industries, with familiarity in compliance frameworks (SEC, NIST, SOC 2) and audit processes.
• Experience in designing processes that meet rigorous data security and record-keeping standards.
• Advanced certifications or expertise in cloud technologies (Azure, AWS, GCP), Cloud Security/Zero Trust architectures, and security operations (identity federation, threat detection, data protection).
• Exposure to AI/ML platforms or governance of emerging technologies is a strong plus.
• Proven success leading large-scale IT projects or transformations, such as M&A integrations, cloud migrations, and infrastructure upgrades, on time and within budget, using structured project management methodologies.
• Familiarity with ITIL or similar frameworks for change control, with a track record of improving processes to reduce operational risk.