Senior IT Manager - Infrastructure Cloud Platforms

Overview

This is a remote role that may only be hired in the following location(s): Arizona, North Carolina and Texas.

The Senior IT Manager - Infrastructure Cloud Platforms is accountable for the operational health, reliability, security, resilience, and lifecycle management of enterprise Private Cloud, Public Cloud, and Container platforms. The portfolio includes VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), Azure VMware Solution (AVS), Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Red Hat OpenShift.

This leader will manage and develop a team of infrastructure and cloud professionals responsible for highly available production services while driving operational maturity, automation, standardization, observability, and continuous improvement.

The role partners closely with Architecture, Engineering, Information Security, Network, Application teams, Risk, Audit, vendors, and business stakeholders to ensure infrastructure services meet business, regulatory, security, availability, and recovery requirements.

The successful candidate will combine strong people leadership and operational discipline with sufficient technical depth to lead complex hybrid-cloud environments and make sound decisions during incidents, modernization initiatives, and technology lifecycle transitions.

Responsibilities & Qualifications

Responsibilities:

• Lead and manage the day-to-day operations of infrastructure teams supporting Private Cloud, Public Cloud and Containers environments across production, disaster recovery, test, and development platforms.
• Supervise, coach, and develop system administrators and engineers, including workload management, performance feedback, career development, and team planning.
• Ensure high availability and reliability of infrastructure services through proactive monitoring, capacity planning, incident management, root cause analysis, and continuous service improvement.
• Oversee lifecycle management for Private Cloud, Public Cloud and Containers, including installation, configuration, patching, upgrades, decommissioning, and hardware/software currency.
• Maintain operational readiness for backup, restore, replication, and disaster recovery capabilities, ensuring recovery objectives are documented, tested, and achievable.
• Partner with cybersecurity and risk teams to implement secure configuration standards, vulnerability remediation, privileged access controls, endpoint hardening, and compliance with internal policies and regulatory expectations.
• Establish and enforce infrastructure standards for builds, operational procedures, documentation, change controls, and platform governance.
• Coordinate major incident response for supported platforms, providing leadership during outages, service degradation, and recovery events.
• Support audits and examinations by preparing evidence, responding to control inquiries, and remediating identified gaps in a timely manner.
• Manage vendor relationships for software, maintenance, and support services, including issue escalation and service review.
• Contribute to strategic planning for infrastructure modernization, automation, cloud integration where applicable, data center operations, and platform roadmap development.
• Collaborate with application and database teams to support system performance, platform tuning, middleware dependencies, and infrastructure requirements for business initiatives.
• Drive automation and operational efficiency through scripting, configuration management, standardized deployment processes, and reduction of manual support tasks.
• Own capacity and performance management for Private Cloud, Public Cloud and Containers, ensuring sufficient scalability to meet growth and resilience needs.
• Ensure adherence to ITIL-aligned processes for incident, problem, change, request, and configuration management.

Qualifications:
Minimum Required Education and Experience: Bachelor's Degree and 8 years' experience OR High School Diploma or GED/Equivalent and 12 years' experience in Applications development, analysis or engineering

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent combination of education and relevant experience.
• 7+ years of progressive IT infrastructure experience, including administration or engineering responsibilities across multiple enterprise server platforms.
• 5+ years of leadership or management experience, including direct supervision of technical staff, team coordination, or technical lead responsibility in a complex environment.
• Demonstrated experience supporting VMWare Cloud Foundation (VCF), Azure, AWS and Openshift platforms in a mid-sized or large enterprise environment.
• Strong understanding of infrastructure operations, platform hardening, backup/recovery processes, disaster recovery, and production support.
• Experience with change management, incident response, root cause analysis, and operational documentation.
• Ability to communicate effectively with technical teams, senior leadership, auditors, vendors, and business stakeholders.
• Experience working in a regulated environment with strong operational controls, documentation standards, and risk management expectations.

Preferred Areas of Experience:

• Experience in the banking, financial services, or other highly regulated industries.
• Experience supporting core banking platforms, payment systems, loan systems, treasury applications, or other business-critical financial workloads.
• Familiarity with regulatory and control frameworks relevant to financial institutions, such as FFIEC guidance, SOX, PCI DSS, GLBA, or internal audit standards.
• Experience supporting AWS and Azure cloud environments
• Experience with cloud governance, compliance, and operational reporting
• Experience with Monitor cloud environments using Dynatrace, Splunk, CloudWatch, and Azure Monitor.
• Experience with virtualization platforms such as VMware VCF.
• Exposure to infrastructure automation using PowerShell, Python, Ansible, Terraform or similar tools.
• Experience with monitoring and observability platforms for infrastructure health, alerting, and performance analytics.
• Experience participating in or leading disaster recovery exercises, cyber recovery planning, and resilience testing.
• Knowledge of hybrid cloud connectivity and infrastructure integration strategies where applicable.

Skills:

• Infrastructure leadership with the ability to balance hands-on technical depth and managerial accountability.
• Strong knowledge of VMWare VCF administration, including patching, security, troubleshooting, and operational support.
• Strong knowledge of AWS and Azure administration across enterprise distributions, including performance tuning, scripting, patching, and security management.
• Working knowledge of OpenShift administration, system support, and operational best practices.
• Knowledge of system hardening, vulnerability remediation, and infrastructure security controls.
• Strong skills in incident management, problem management, and root cause analysis.
• Ability to create and maintain clear technical documentation, standards, runbooks, and procedures.
• Effective people management, mentoring, and team development skills.
• Strong organizational, prioritization, and decision-making abilities in fast-paced operational environments.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to translate technical issues for non-technical audiences.
• Ability to work collaboratively across infrastructure, security, application, audit, and business teams.

Reporting Structure

The role will report into the Sr. Director Infrastructure and Operations and will have direct responsibility for system administrators, infrastructure engineers, or platform specialists.

Work Environment

This role may require participation in an on-call rotation, after-hours maintenance activities, disaster recovery testing, and incident response for critical production systems.

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Additional Information

Benefits are an integral part of total rewards and First Citizens Bank is committed to providing a competitive, thoughtfully designed and quality benefits program to meet the needs of our associates. More information can be found at https://jobs.firstcitizens.com/benefits.