Director, Operations Platform, Business Transformation

FirstService Residential simplifies property management, serving 9,000 residential communities across the United States and Canada. The organization partners with boards, owners, and developers to enhance property value and resident life. Recognized as a Great Place to Work, FirstService Residential fosters a positive and inclusive workplace culture with competitive salaries, top-tier medical, dental, and retirement benefits, career training, and professional development opportunities.

About the Role

The Director, Operations Platform, Business Transformation holds a strategic position within FirstService Residential, ensuring the integrity and consistency of a new financial and operations platform as the single system of record. This role is responsible for maintaining a unified platform configuration, governing platform changes, and providing expert oversight to prevent configuration drift. The Director acts as the authoritative voice on platform decisions, supports internal and vendor relationships, and drives migration enablement to ensure seamless transitions.

Responsibilities

• Platform Configuration Standards:
  • Own the configuration baseline for the new financial and operations platform, maintaining it as a documented, versioned, and change-managed asset.
  • Enforce one configuration standard across all migration waves to prevent drift between waves and markets.
• Platform Change Governance:
  • Operate the platform-change gate: classify platform-significant changes by severity, approve conforming changes, and block or route non-conforming changes to an executive adjudication body.
  • Disposition changes within tiered service levels: Tier 1 (migration or financial-integrity blockers) within one business day; Tier 2 (operational impacts) within three business days; Tier 3 (non-structural changes) in weekly batch review.
  • Apply the precedence rule: where a change involves both a product decision and a master-data change, the master-data gate governs, and the matter routes to adjudication.
• Platform Support Operations:
  • Establish and own the internal platform support function, including intake, triage, resolution, and escalation of platform issues.
  • Manage the vendor support relationship, including escalation management and accountability to committed response and resolution SLAs.
• Migration Enablement:
  • Drive vendor-side dependencies that gate the data migration program to timely closure, including pending import templates and vendor-side configuration decisions.
  • Own the vendor-side review of each migration wave’s load, conference-room pilot, user acceptance testing, and cutover.
• Vendor Delivery Assurance:
  • Review vendor Professional Services deliverables (configuration, data loads, testing design) as the company’s independent expert check, surfacing risks before production.
  • Provide expert oversight to ensure the vendor delivers the committed platform quality and behavior.
• Platform Decision Quality:
  • Serve as the required technical voice on platform-significant decisions, providing a documented recommendation-of-record before finalization.
  • Supply the authoritative technical position on structural decisions, such as the chart of accounts approach and database topology, grounded in evidence like vendor load-modeling.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration:
  • Partner with data engineering, data products, architecture, and business tower leadership to align platform decisions with business and program goals.
  • Maintain clean role boundaries: gate conformance to the enterprise data model without authoring it, escalating structural master-data decisions to executive owners.
• Team Leadership:
  • Build the platform support capability, adding and developing direct support staff as the first migration wave approaches go-live.
  • Foster a culture of platform stewardship, quality, and consistency across teams and vendors.
• Additional Duties:
  • Adhere to FirstService Residential Global Service Standards and maintain high personal, professional, and ethical standards.
  • Perform or assist with operations to maintain workflow and meet schedules, including notifying supervision of issues or supply needs.
  • Participate in meetings and work groups to integrate activities, communicate issues, and resolve problems.
  • Ensure safety precautions are followed and policies/Standard Operating Procedures are adhered to.
  • Perform special projects, tasks, and other related duties as assigned.

Supervisory Responsibility

Initially an individual leadership role. A platform support position will be added under this role as the first migration wave approaches go-live, with the team expected to grow as subsequent waves are migrated.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Business, Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of experience with an established financial and operations platform, including hands-on configuration and administration.
• Demonstrated experience operating a platform estate as a system of record, including security models, workflow configuration, and platform standards.
• Experience managing enterprise vendor relationships, including support escalation and SLA accountability.

Skills

• Deep, hands-on financial and operations platform expertise, including configuration, chart of accounts structures, security models, and platform operations at scale.
• Judgment to run a change-control gate: distinguishing conforming changes from structurally significant ones and maintaining standards under pressure.
• Credibility to make decisions stick where the role has authority and to carry weight where it advises.
• Understanding of large-scale data migration lifecycles, including data loads, conference-room pilots, user acceptance testing, and production cutover.
• Ability to operate as a trusted peer to data engineering, data products, and architecture leadership while maintaining clear role boundaries.
• Experience standing up or running a platform/application support function.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, including documenting clear technical recommendations for executive audiences.
• Highly analytical, detail-oriented, and strong problem-solving skills.
• Team player with the ability to follow processes, work effectively in teams, maintain a positive attitude, and adapt to changing priorities.

Tools & Equipment Used

• Financial and operations platform (to be announced) and its associated modules.
• Vendor support and service-request tooling.
• Microsoft Office suite.
• Enterprise collaboration, ticketing, and program-management tools as assigned.

Schedule

Hours over and above regular office hours may be required, including evenings, holidays, and weekends, particularly surrounding migration wave cutovers. The schedule is subject to change based on business needs.

Travel

Occasional travel may be required to regional market offices and vendor engagements in support of migration waves.