Director of IT Services

Location: Jackson, MS

Position Type: Contract

Contract Duration: 12 Months

Work Schedule: Monday Friday, 8:00 AM 5:00 PM CST

Work Arrangement: On-Site

Career Level: Subject Matter Expert (SME)

Primary Skills

Enterprise IT Operations, IT Infrastructure Management, IT Leadership, AWS, Cloud Services, Enterprise Networking, LAN/WAN, DNS, Load Balancing, Wireless Networking, Telecommunications, IT Service Desk Management, Incident Management, IT Service Management, Vendor Management, Contract Management, SOW Development, IT Governance, Cybersecurity, Compliance, Disaster Recovery, Backup & Recovery, Infrastructure Modernization, Executive Communication, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Active Directory, VMware, Cohesity, Dynatrace, Cloudflare, F5 BIG-IP, Cisco Meraki, Auth0, GitLab, MarkLogic, FHIR APIs, Cloverleaf, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Smartsheet, and enterprise IT service-management platforms

Position Overview

We are seeking an experienced Director of IT Services to provide senior-level leadership and operational oversight across enterprise IT infrastructure, cloud services, networking, service desk operations, cybersecurity coordination, vendor management, and IT service governance.

This position will play a key role in managing day-to-day IT operations while supporting enterprise technology modernization initiatives, including cloud migration, infrastructure modernization, cloud-native services, and improvements to IT service delivery.

The ideal candidate will bring extensive enterprise IT leadership experience, strong AWS expertise, proven infrastructure and service-management capabilities, and the ability to communicate complex technical issues effectively to executive stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide strategic and operational leadership for enterprise IT infrastructure and services.
• Lead enterprise cloud operations, cloud migration, provisioning, monitoring, capacity management, governance, and cost optimization.
• Oversee AWS environments and services including EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch, and Landing Zone architectures.
• Direct enterprise network and telecommunications operations, including LAN/WAN, wireless, Internet connectivity, remote access, DNS, load balancing, and unified communications.
• Lead IT service desk and end-user support operations and establish performance KPIs.
• Oversee incident escalation, major incident management, root-cause analysis, and post-incident reviews.
• Manage enterprise infrastructure including compute, storage, virtualization, operating systems, monitoring, backup, and recovery.
• Lead infrastructure modernization, technology lifecycle management, hardware refreshes, and capacity planning.
• Establish and maintain disaster recovery, redundancy, backup, and resiliency capabilities.
• Partner with cybersecurity teams to support security controls, risk assessments, audits, compliance reviews, and vulnerability remediation.
• Provide executive oversight of technology vendors and managed service providers.
• Support SOW development, procurement activities, contract negotiations, vendor performance reviews, and escalations.
• Establish IT service-management governance covering incident, problem, change, configuration, request, and service-level management.
• Develop enterprise service catalogs, SOPs, executive dashboards, and IT performance reports.
• Lead technology outages and service disruptions through resolution and corrective action.
• Participate in hiring and interview processes for infrastructure and technical support positions.
• Provide regular status reporting and executive-level communication to IT leadership.

• 10+ years of progressive IT experience, including significant enterprise IT operations and infrastructure management.
• 8+ years of leadership or management experience with technical teams, managers, engineers, and support personnel.
• 2+ years of enterprise AWS experience, including EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, CloudWatch, and Landing Zone architectures.
• 2+ years of enterprise networking experience, including LAN/WAN, DNS, load balancing, wireless infrastructure, and telecommunications.
• 2+ years of experience with enterprise monitoring and observability platforms.
• 2+ years of IT service desk management experience, including service-level and incident management.
• 2+ years of IT vendor management, contract oversight, SOW development, and procurement support.
• 2+ years of experience managing data protection and backup solutions.
• 2+ years of experience with cybersecurity principles, compliance frameworks, and IT governance in regulated environments.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to communicate technical issues to executive audiences.
• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Management Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.

• Experience working in state or federal government IT environments.
• Healthcare, Medicaid, or human services technology experience.
• Experience with CMS interoperability requirements and FHIR APIs.
• AWS certification such as Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator, or Cloud Practitioner.
• ITIL v4 Foundation or higher certification.
• Experience with identity and access management platforms.
• Experience with NoSQL databases and healthcare integration engines.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and DevOps practices.
• Experience leading migrations from on-premises data centers to cloud environments.
• PMP or similar project management certification.
• Master's degree in a technology or management discipline.
• Experience with HIPAA Security Rule compliance and applicable CMS security requirements.