Senior Director, Infrastructure

Excelsior University is seeking a senior, results-driven Senior Director of Infrastructure, Networking & Security to lead the strategy, architecture, and evolution of the university's core technology infrastructure during a period of growth and institutional expansion. This executive-level role is accountable for ensuring infrastructure platforms are secure, resilient, scalable, and future-ready, with primary responsibility for enterprise networking, cloud and hosting platforms, identity foundations, and infrastructure security.

A defining responsibility of this role is the development of a high-performing infrastructure organization, grounded in industry best practices for engineering leadership, architectural governance, and talent development. The Senior Director establishes clear standards, roles, and expectations; invests in professional growth; and builds a culture of discipline, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement, ensuring infrastructure capabilities can be sustainably delivered at scale.

The role plays a critical part in enabling hybrid and multi-site environments, supporting institutional growth initiatives, and integrating infrastructure associated with mergers, acquisitions, or strategic partnerships., * Infrastructure Strategy & Architecture

• Develop and execute a comprehensive infrastructure, networking, and security strategy aligned with institutional priorities, growth objectives, and risk posture.
• Lead the architecture, design principles, and long-term direction of secure, scalable, and resilient infrastructure platforms across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise environments.
• Establish multi-year infrastructure roadmaps covering network modernization, cloud adoption, identity platforms, resiliency architecture, and capacity planning.
• Define and govern infrastructure standards and reference architectures that reduce complexity, technical debt, and institutional risk.
• Build, develop, and sustain a high-performing infrastructure and networking organization using industry best practices for engineering leadership.
• Establish clear roles, responsibilities, decision rights, and career pathways for infrastructure, networking, and platform engineering staff.
• Promote modern engineering practices including architecture governance, peer review, documentation standards, knowledge sharing, and cross-training.
• Invest in continuous learning, professional development, and certifications aligned with evolving infrastructure and security needs.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement, avoiding hero-based or ad-hoc dependency models.
• Lead the university's cloud and hybrid infrastructure strategy (IaaS, PaaS, and platform services), ensuring effective integration with on-premise environments.
• Guide architectural decisions for hosting, compute, storage, backup, and recovery platforms supporting mission-critical systems.
• Ensure infrastructure platforms are designed for scalability, security, sustainability, and long-term internal supportability.

• Enterprise Networking & Connectivity Architecture

• Own the enterprise network architecture, including LAN, WAN, Wi-Fi, VPN, and secure remote access capabilities.
• Ensure network designs support distributed learners, faculty, staff, and hybrid sites with appropriate performance, segmentation, resiliency, and security controls.
• Guide adoption of modern networking approaches where they materially improve visibility, scalability, and security.

• Infrastructure Security & Resilience

• Partner closely with the CISO to ensure security-by-design is Embedded into all infrastructure and network architectures.
• Own infrastructure-level disaster recovery, business continuity, and high-availability architecture, ensuring designs are viable, well-documented, and regularly exercised.
• Ensure infrastructure platforms support institutional regulatory, compliance, and audit requirements through secure and well-governed design practices.
• Provide leadership for vendor selection, contract oversight, and infrastructure investment decisions.
• Evaluate infrastructure technologies with a focus on long-term sustainability, internal skill alignment, security posture, and total cost of ownership.
• Avoid solutions that introduce unnecessary complexity, fragility, or single-point knowledge dependencies.

• Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement

• Partner with the CIO, CISO, Applications, Data/BI, Help Desk, and Web teams to ensure infrastructure capabilities effectively support institutional needs.
• Clearly communicate infrastructure strategies, risks, dependencies, and investment tradeoffs to executive leadership and non-technical stakeholders.
• Support institutional initiatives by ensuring infrastructure readiness, scalability, and long-term sustainability.

This is a Full time hybrid role with a minimum of two required days at Excelsior's home office of 7 Columbia Circle, Albany, NY, with the remainder of the days worked from home., * Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field; Master's degree preferred.

• Minimum 10 years of progressive leadership experience in infrastructure, networking, and cloud platform roles.
• Deep technical expertise across enterprise networking, cloud and hybrid infrastructure, identity platforms, compute, storage, and resiliency architecture.
• Demonstrated experience embedding security and compliance into infrastructure architecture and platform decisions.
• Proven success leading major infrastructure modernization initiatives, including network transformation and cloud adoption.
• Experience supporting or leading technology integration related to mergers, acquisitions, or multi-site expansions (preferred).
• Strong financial, vendor, and investment management skills.
• Experience in higher education or similarly complex, regulated environments preferred.
• Knowledge of regulatory and compliance requirements (eg, FERPA, SOC-aligned controls, ISO-aligned practices).
• High-Performance Team Builder: Develops strong infrastructure teams using clear standards, expectations, and continuous development.
• Infrastructure Leadership: Designs and governs durable, secure, and scalable technology foundations.
• Architectural Rigor: Thinks in systems, standards, and long-term sustainability rather than short-term fixes.
• Risk & Resilience Focus: Anticipates failure modes and designs platforms and teams for continuity.
• Security-by-Design Mindset: Treats cybersecurity as a foundational architectural requirement.
• Executive Communication: Clearly articulates infrastructure capabilities, risks, and investment priorities to non-technical leaders.

The hiring salary range for this position is $120,000.00 - $135,000.00. The hiring salary range above represents the University's good faith estimate at the time of posting.