Availability Director, IT Core Engineering

PenFed is hiring a (Hybrid) Availability Director, IT Core Engineering at our Tysons, Virginia location.  The primary purpose of this job is to help improve system availability through prevention of issues causing unavailability, detecting through effective monitoring and early intervention, managing the outage calls with all the stakeholders efficiently and purposefully. This role is critical in ensuring the stability, reliability, and continuous improvement of IT services in a dynamic, high availability environment. The Availability Director will ensure that incidents, problems and changes are managed effectively, minimizing the impact to PenFed members and internal customers. The job function requires extensive experience in leading and maturing ITIL-based processes, specifically in Incident Management, Change Management and Problem Management. Adequate experience in managing overseas vendor partners is essential. In addition, this position will work with IT Governance, Business Resiliency, Audit, Vendors, Business Stakeholders, PenFed Senior Management and other IT teams to reduce the number and frequency of incidents and improve service recovery times.

Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. This is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of job duties and the position will perform other duties as assigned.

• Own and drive the strategy, governance, and execution of Incident, Problem and Change management functions for the IT organization, including the management of the lifecycle of changes, incidents and associated problems.
• Establish KPIs, dashboards, and reporting mechanisms to monitor service health and drive accountability.
• Oversee the incident response process, ensuring timely and effective resolution of high-severity incidents.  Aid in facilitating communications during these incidents, including verbal/written executive level status, running related conference calls and acting as a liaison with business stakeholders. Provide verbal and written status updates to all stakeholders.
• For any high severity incidents, capture any required follow up and ensure follow up assignments are completed.  Drive root cause analysis and follow-up actions for high severity incidents.  Update processes and procedures accordingly to ensure improvements are made as a result of lessons learned.
• Coordinate, monitor, and support general activities related to incidents, problems and changes.  Facilitate daily, weekly and monthly meetings related to Incident, Problem and Change Management. Identify production environment stability trends. Escalate concerns through the appropriate process to minimize business impact with a key objective of High Severity and Major Incident deterrence.
• Analysis of the incident, problem and change data, as well as recurring alerts, to identify the associated root causes and develops plans and actions to resolve and eliminate these problems at all Severity Levels.
• Assess risk of changes, incidents and problems, along with other IT staff, to appropriately prioritize scheduling of production implementations, incident remediation changes and problem resolution changes.
• Assess risk survey questions and scoring to ensure changes are adequately addressed at the right risk level.  Adjust risk scores as required to ensure appropriate assessments.
• Develop and maintain ticket escalation steps and contacts. Drive decision-making for incident resolution to minimize impact to business. Escalate to Senior IT Management as needed.
• Ensure that all IT teams follow the Incident, Problem and Change Management processes and that the required information is properly documented in the incident record.
• Develop, drive, and maintain the effectiveness of incident, problem and change management processes and procedures. Participate in reviews and audits of the process. Challenge the process and make recommendations for improvement.
• Assist in developing incident and problem management to show performance within the environment.
• Work with IT Governance, Business Resiliency, Audit, Vendors, Business Stakeholders, PenFed Senior Management and other IT teams.
• Monitors for compliance of defined process standards and policies.
• Manage relationships with third party service providers, ensuring contractual obligations, SLAs, and performance standards are met.
• Conduct regular service reviews and performance evaluations with vendors.
• Collaborate with procurement and legal teams for contract negotiations and renewals.          

Equivalent combination of education and experience is considered.

• Bachelor’s Degree in a related field.
• Minimum of 20 years of experience in IT service management, with a least 10 years in a leadership role, preferably in financial services.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience working with and managing outsourced or managed service providers.
• Experience in leadership role dealing with internal and external auditors and regulators.
• Proficient in Change Management, Problem Management, and Incident Management in an ITIL environment.
• Proven experience managing ITIL-based processes across large, complex environments.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and problem-solving skills.
• High proficiency with creating and presenting management reports and Dashboards.
• Require excellent customer service, oral and written communication skills.
• Basic knowledge and experience in using enterprise level monitoring tools and dashboards.
• Demonstrated ability to perform successfully in a high stress, open environment where frequent & direct interaction & collaboration with customers & peers is ordinary.
• ITIL v3 or v4 certification a plus.
• Familiarity with service management tools.
• Experience using A.I. tools preferred.

Supervisory Responsibility

This position will supervise employees.

Licenses and Certifications

ITIL v3 or v4 certification a plus.

Work Environment

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly exposed to an indoor office setting with moderate noise.

*Most roles require working in an office setting with moderate noise and the ability to lift 25 pounds.*

Travel

Limited travel to various worksites is required.

Pay Transparency 
The anticipated starting salary range for this role is $121,800.00 - $267,473.00
This position is eligible for an organizational performance based annual bonus, subject to board discretion and approval.
This position is eligible for an individual performance based annual bonus.