Next Step Systems is hiring a Director of Technology, Onsite in Charlotte, NC

Director of Technology, Onsite in Charlotte, NC The Director of Technology is responsible for the entire technology platform, overseeing both customer-facing systems and internal infrastructure to ensure 24x7 availability, security, and scalability across Azure Cloud and on-premises environments. This hands-on leadership role balances technical execution and strategic management, including building a high-performing team, driving operational excellence, implementing security controls, and supporting the company’s rapid growth. This position is a 50% hands-on and 50% management type of a role. Hands-on capabilities with infrastructure/data center management, cloud transformation and DevOps is necessary for this role. This position is 100% Onsite in Charlotte, NC. Director of Technology Responsibilities: Leadership & Strategy: - Build, mentor, and retain a team of 8 engineers across Infrastructure/Network, DevOps/SRE, and Desktop/End-User Support, providing technical coaching, career development, and performance management. - Own platform strategy, roadmap, and execution to meet business goals and customer SLAs. - Define and track operational KPIs (availability, Mean Time to Repair (MTTR), change success rate, incident volume, cloud cost efficiency) and present regular updates to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and executive team. - Take full ownership of platform strategy, roadmap, and execution aligned with business objectives, product needs, and customer Service Level Agreements (SLA)s. - Establish operational cadence: incident reviews, change advisory board, service desk metrics, team retrospectives, and continuous improvement of culture. Platform Operations & Architecture: - Own the design, implementation, and 24x7 operation of the company’s hybrid infrastructure (Azure and on-premises) supporting both production and internal corporate systems. - Ensure high availability, scalability, performance, security, and cost efficiency across all environments. - Hands-on architecture and implementation of cloud infrastructure, networking, identity management (Azure AD/Entra, RBAC), storage, backup, monitoring, and observability. - Drive cloud optimization initiatives: rightsizing, reserved capacity, architectural improvements, and cost governance across Azure workloads. - Define and enforce platform standards for networking, security, identity, logging, alerting, and operational discipline. DevOps & Site Reliability Engineering: - Lead DevOps and SRE transformation: implement CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) (Terraform, ARM/Bicep), containerization (Kubernetes), and modern deployment practices. - Hands-on implementation of Kubernetes clusters, container orchestration, service mesh, and cloud-native architecture patterns. - Establish Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles: error budgets, SLOs/SLIs, blameless postmortems, observability (metrics/logs/traces), and reliability engineering culture. - Build and optimize CI/CD tooling and workflows to improve release velocity, reduce deployment risk, and increase developer productivity. - Implement robust change management processes (risk assessment, testing, communication, rollback procedures) that balance speed, safety, and audit readiness. Information Security & Compliance: - Implement security and compliance controls, including access management, logging and monitoring, vulnerability management, incident response, and audit evidence collection. - Establish security best practices across infrastructure: network segmentation, firewall rules, encryption (data at rest/in transit), secrets management, privileged access management. - Lead incident response for infrastructure and platform issues, including root cause analysis, remediation, and process improvements. - Own Disaster Recovery strategy and execution: define RPO/RTO targets, architect multi-region and hybrid DR solutions, develop runbooks, and conduct regular DR testing. - Ensure backup and restore capabilities across all critical systems with documented procedures and validated recovery processes. Desktop & End-User Support: - Oversee desktop, endpoint, and telecom services (laptops, mobile devices, productivity tools, collaboration platforms, voice/conferencing) to deliver reliable, secure employee experiences. - Implement IT service management practices (incident, request, problem, asset management) with clear SLAs and user satisfaction metrics. - Manage vendor relationships across infrastructure, telecom, SaaS, and managed services—evaluate contracts, optimize licensing, and ensure service quality.