IT Associate Director - Automation Engineering

OculusIT is seeking an experienced Engineering Leader – Infrastructure Automation to drive a unified automation strategy across network, data center, compute, storage, virtualization, cloud, ITSM, and observability. This leader will play a critical role in transforming infrastructure operations by making automation, engineering discipline, reliability, scalability, and operational excellence the foundation of the infrastructure platform.

Key Responsibilities:

Automation Strategy & Architecture

• Define and execute an enterprise-wide infrastructure automation strategy.
• Establish standards and architecture for IaC, CI/CD, configuration management, and automation frameworks.
• Build a cohesive automation ecosystem across infrastructure domains rather than siloed solutions.

Platform Engineering & Delivery

• Lead the design and delivery of automated infrastructure lifecycle processes, including provisioning, patching, scaling, upgrades, and decommissioning.
• Partner with infrastructure engineering teams to embed automation into day-to-day operations.
• Drive repeatable, code-based infrastructure patterns and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices.

Reliability & Operational Excellence

• Leverage automation to improve:
• Change reliability and safety
• Patch and lifecycle compliance
• Incident response and recovery
• Infrastructure resiliency and failover
• Integrate automation with observability and monitoring platforms to generate actionable telemetry.

Governance & Continuous Improvement

• Define and track metrics such as automation coverage, patch compliance, and automated change success rate.
• Establish governance around automation pipelines, infrastructure code quality, security, and tooling standards.
• Continuously identify opportunities to improve infrastructure efficiency and reliability.

Leadership & Team Development

• Build, lead, and develop a high-performing automation/platform engineering team.
• Coach engineers across different experience levels and promote technical growth.
• Foster a culture of ownership, collaboration, engineering rigor, knowledge sharing, and continuous modernization.

Required Qualifications:

• Proven experience leading infrastructure automation, platform engineering, or DevOps teams in complex environments.
• Strong technical knowledge across network, compute, storage, virtualization, cloud, and data center infrastructure.
• Hands-on expertise with Ansible, Terraform, IaC, CI/CD, and configuration management.
• Demonstrated success implementing automation at scale across multiple infrastructure domains.
• Strong understanding of ITSM, change/incident/problem management, observability, SRE, and infrastructure reliability.
• Proven experience managing, mentoring, and developing technical teams.
• Strong program management, organizational, communication, and presentation skills.
• Ability to identify complex problems, develop effective solutions, and drive execution.
• Experience managing multiple complex projects while meeting timelines and objectives.

Leadership Capabilities:

The ideal leader will work closely with Infrastructure Engineering, TechOps, Information Security, Compliance, and other technology teams.

The candidate should demonstrate:

• Strong technical communication skills with the ability to bridge engineering teams and senior leadership.
• Ability to influence and align teams in a decentralized/federated environment.
• Strong execution and program delivery discipline.
• Ability to translate strategy and vision into actionable roadmaps.
• Focus on accountability, measurable outcomes, and business impact.
• Strong change-management and stakeholder-management capabilities.

Education & Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of relevant experience, or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Significant experience in infrastructure automation, platform engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure leadership.