Senior Director, IT Service Operations
Summary
Overview
The Senior Director, IT Service Operations owns the IT Service Operations pillar: Technical Support, Networks, Asset and Fleet Management, Account Management and identity provisioning, and Service Delivery. This role is the operational command layer that translates strategy into daily execution, holds the pillar accountable to published standards, and builds the operating model that lets managers manage and engineers engineer without constant escalation. This is a people leadership and operational management role, not a technical architect or engineer role. You will set the standards, evaluate work against them, and hold engineers accountable to them. Success is measured by the performance, cohesion, and growth of the team, and by the maturity of the practices the team runs.
Who We Are
The ASPCA is the nation's largest humane society and one of the world's leading animal welfare organizations. Our mission is to provide effective means for the prevention of cruelty to animals throughout the United States. The Information Technology division supports approximately 1,400 employees across New York City headquarters, shelters, clinics, mobile rescue units, and field operations nationwide.
This is an opportunity to lead a transformation as the pillar is in active growth and we are looking for someone to establish practices where none exist, retire workarounds that have become load-bearing, and shepherd a shift toward structured, repeatable operations through coaching and collaboration rather than mandate. The candidate who will thrive here wants to build, is energized by ambiguity and challenge, and is driven by our mission.
A cover letter is optional, but strongly encouraged.
What You’ll Do
- Lead the IT service operations that keep animal welfare work moving, across shelters, clinics, mobile rescue units, and field operations nationwide. As Sr. Director, IT Service Operations, you will build the operating model, standards, and team capability that carry the ASPCA's technology organization from reactive support to disciplined, measurable service delivery for more than 1,400 staff.
- The Sr. Director, IT Service Operations reports directly to the VP, Technology Services and has 4-6 direct and matrixed reports, with approximately 15 indirect reports. Additionally, this role serves as the operational deputy to the VP, Technology Services, acting with delegated authority during the VP's absence and at the VP's direction on matters that extend across the division.
Where and When You’ll Work
- This is a hybrid position requiring a minimum of 2 days per week on-site at an ASPCA New York City area location, with additional travel to ASPCA sites as described below.
- Ability and willingness to travel up to 15% annually to ASPCA shelter, clinic, and field sites, as needed. Travel may involve environments with animals and standard shelter or clinic conditions
- Must be available for off-hours escalation and major incident bridge participation, and shares the after-hours escalation rotation with the IT Leadership
What You’ll Get
Compensation
Starting pay for the successful applicant will depend on a variety of factors, including but not limited to education, training, experience, location, business needs, internal equity, market demands or budgeted amount for the role. The target hiring range is for new hire offers only, and staff compensation may increase beyond the maximum hiring range based on performance over time. The maximum of the hiring range is reserved for candidates with the highest qualifications and relevant experience. The expected hiring salary range for this role is set forth below and may be modified in the future.
- The target hiring range for this role is $188,000 - $200,000 annually
Benefits
At the ASPCA, you don’t have to choose between your passion and making a living. Our comprehensive benefits package helps ensure you can live a rewarding life at work and at home. Our benefits include but are not limited to:
- Affordable health coverage, including medical, employer-paid dental and optional vision coverage.
- Flexible time off that includes vacation time, paid personal time, sick time, bereavement time, paid parental leave, and 10 company paid holidays that allows you even more flexibility to observe the days that mean the most to you.
- Competitive financial incentives and retirement savings, including a 401(k) plan with generous employer contributions — we match dollar-for-dollar up to 4% and provide an additional 4% contribution toward your future each year.
- Robust professional development opportunities including classes, on-the-job training, coaching and mentorship with industry-leading peers, internal mobility, opportunities to support in the field and so much more.
Responsibilities
Responsibilities
Responsibility buckets are listed in general order of importance. They include, but are not limited to:
People Leadership and Team Development
- Manage a team of 4-6 employees to succeed in their role by communicating clear expectations, providing opportunities for learning and development and building positive and trusting relationships.
- Support your direct reports by holding regular effective feedback conversations, career conversations, annual performance evaluations and ongoing check-in conversations with each team member on a cadence that's appropriate for their role(s).
- Translate the VP's strategy into documented team-level goals and measurable quarterly deliverables for each function in the pillar, and review progress against them on a published cadence.
- Produce and maintain cross-training and succession coverage plans that eliminate single points of failure across Technical Support, Networks, Asset Management, and Account Management.
- Develop strategic planning capability in senior individual contributors, creating pathways for functional experts to own roadmaps and standards rather than only deliverables.
- Own recruitment and onboarding for open positions within the pillar, partnering with Talent Acquisition to close gaps that constrain service coverage.
- Serve as the primary escalation path for functional managers, resolving complexity and assigning resources so that the need for escalation is a rarity.
- Partner with the VP and People Team on performance management, including documentation and follow-through.
Infrastructure Service Operations and Daily Execution
- Own the daily and weekly operating rhythm across all supported locations, including standups, incident triage, change windows, and escalation management.
- Oversee multi-site technical operations across New York City, Ohio, Florida, Los Angeles, Illinois, North Carolina, and other field locations, ensuring service continuity and site-specific coverage plans.
- Own on-call rotation coverage and its long-term sustainability, monitoring load distribution and rotation health as a leading indicator of team wellbeing.
- Serve as the operational deputy to the VP, Technology Services, stepping in with delegated authority during the VP's absence and at the VP's direction on matters that extend across the division, including cross-pillar escalations and time-sensitive decisions that cannot wait for the VP's return.
- Own scheduled disaster recovery and service continuity testing for services within the pillar, and document results and remediation.
- Lead major incident response including bridge ownership, stakeholder communication, root cause analysis coordination, and post-incident review facilitation.
- Share the after-hours major incident escalation rotation with IT Leadership.
- Maintain the pillar's resource allocation model and surface demand versus capacity gaps before they become delivery failures.
- Own the outcomes of network engineering strategy across all ASPCA locations. Set the multi-site network roadmap, hold architecture and resilience standards including ISP redundancy and carrier diversity, and negotiate framework decisions with departmental stakeholders to reach the best organizational outcome rather than the fastest local one.
- Partner with the Sr. Network Engineer as the operational owner of network delivery, incorporating site-level operating expertise into strategy formation while developing their strategic planning capability toward broader ownership over time.
ITSM Practice Ownership and Process Maturity
- Own the ITIL practice set for the pillar covering Incident, Problem, Change Enablement, Service Request, and Knowledge Management. Publish and enforce the operating standards for each, including severity classification, escalation paths, SLA and OLA definitions, and major incident runbooks, and advance the pillar from informal practice to documented, repeatable, and measured operations.
- Define and publish the pillar's performance measurement system. Select the metric set, build the FreshService reporting infrastructure that produces it, and report results in quarterly operational reviews with the VP and functional managers.
- Chair the existing Change Advisory Board and hold teams accountable to change management standards, including a defined exception path for emergency change.
- Own the Problem Management practice and the Known Error Database, ensuring problem records close only with documented remediation or formally accepted risk.
- Own support scale transformation as a practice under ITSM services, covering knowledge management, self-service, and onboarding and offboarding service design, measured against published deflection and time-to-productive targets.
- Own the FreshService governance model including service catalog structure, knowledge article standards, assignment group configuration, and reporting dashboards, partnering with the Sr. Manager, Technical Services as platform owner.
- Own the runbook program: define the standard, assign ownership to functional engineers, and track completion against quarterly targets....