Director of IT Services

Location: Jackson, MS; Position Type: Contract; Contract Duration: 12 Months; Work Arrangement: On-Site; Career Level: Subject Matter Expert (SME)

About the role

We are seeking an experienced Director of IT Services to provide senior-level leadership and operational oversight across enterprise IT infrastructure, cloud services, networking, service desk operations, cybersecurity coordination, vendor management, and IT service governance. This position will play a key role in managing day-to-day IT operations while supporting enterprise technology modernization initiatives, including cloud migration, infrastructure modernization, cloud-native services, and improvements to IT service delivery. The ideal candidate will bring extensive enterprise IT leadership experience, strong AWS expertise, proven infrastructure and service-management capabilities, and the ability to communicate complex technical issues effectively to executive stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Provide strategic and operational leadership for enterprise IT infrastructure and services.
• Lead enterprise cloud operations, cloud migration, provisioning, monitoring, capacity management, governance, and cost optimization.
• Oversee AWS environments and services including EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch, and Landing Zone architectures.
• Direct enterprise network and telecommunications operations, including LAN/WAN, wireless, Internet connectivity, remote access, DNS, load balancing, and unified communications.
• Lead IT service desk and end-user support operations and establish performance KPIs.
• Oversee incident escalation, major incident management, root-cause analysis, and post-incident reviews.
• Manage enterprise infrastructure including compute, storage, virtualization, operating systems, monitoring, backup, and recovery.
• Lead infrastructure modernization, technology lifecycle management, hardware refreshes, and capacity planning.
• Establish and maintain disaster recovery, redundancy, backup, and resiliency capabilities.
• Partner with cybersecurity teams to support security controls, risk assessments, audits, compliance reviews, and vulnerability remediation.
• Provide executive oversight of technology vendors and managed service providers.
• Support SOW development, procurement activities, contract negotiations, vendor performance reviews, and escalations.
• Establish IT service-management governance covering incident, problem, change, configuration, request, and service-level management.
• Develop enterprise service catalogs, SOPs, executive dashboards, and IT performance reports.
• Lead technology outages and service disruptions through resolution and corrective action.
• Participate in hiring and interview processes for infrastructure and technical support positions.
• Provide regular status reporting and executive-level communication to IT leadership.

Requirements

• 10+ years of progressive IT experience, including significant enterprise IT operations and infrastructure management.
• 8+ years of leadership or management experience with technical teams, managers, engineers, and support personnel.
• 2+ years of enterprise AWS experience, including EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch, and Landing Zone architectures.
• 2+ years of enterprise networking