Director, Engineering Infrastructure

Location: Northbrook, IL, US

Employment Type: Full Time

As a Director, Engineering Infrastructure, you will own the vision, strategy, and execution for the foundational technology of our enterprise, leading through your teams and cross-functional partnerships. You will be accountable for the multi-year infrastructure modernization, including the capital strategy and forecasting, across on-premise and cloud environments, ensuring we are positioned to adopt, integrate, and utilize emerging technologies. In this role, you will oversee multiple engineering teams across infrastructure domains, lead strategic planning and delivery/execution for core infrastructure systems, and influence the long-term strategy for infrastructure architecture and capacity planning. Your leadership will ensure the reliability and performance of critical systems supporting the broader organization.

• This position is fully remote

• This role is a People leader position 

A day in the life as a Director, Engineering Infrastructure…

• Define and execute the long-term capital roadmap for our data center and cloud hosting footprint, managing the forecasting, budgeting, and procurement strategy for a multi-million dollar portfolio, modernizing our "core" to meet modern availability and performance requirements using hybrid capabilities

• Direct the strategic modernization of mission-critical platforms, including the IBM iSeries and AIX environments. You will implement rigorous Business Continuity (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) standards, ensuring 24/7 resilience for our supply chain and retail operations

• Support our growth initiative by driving the evolution of our retail edge technology, championing automation and "Zero Touch Provisioning" strategies to remove IT from the critical path, ensuring our physical locations scale as fast as our digital channels.

• Champion the architecture, engineering, and operation of our core infrastructure across on-premise, co-location, and cloud environments, building highly resilient and available systems, ensuring that our core infrastructure becomes a trusted, inherent commodity for the business. 

• Translate complex business objectives into executable technical strategies that drive measurable efficiency and risk reduction within the core infrastructure domain.

• Provide strategic leadership for multiple systems engineering teams, overseeing a significant infrastructure domain

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineering managers and senior technical leaders, fostering a culture of accountability and continuous improvement

• Lead the strategic planning and oversee the end-to-end delivery of major infrastructure and systems programs and product initiatives, ensuring high quality, scalability, reliability, security, and timely execution that aligns with organizational goals

• Collaborate with executive leadership, product management, and other engineering heads to align infrastructure objectives with business goals

What you’ll bring to the table…  

• Deep understanding of modern systems engineering methodologies, infrastructure automation, and cloud-native architectures at scale

• Strong business acumen with the ability to align infrastructure strategy with business outcomes

• Excellent communication, negotiation, and influencing skills, with the ability to engage effectively at all levels, including executive leadership

• Demonstrated experience in managing budgets, resource planning, and vendor relationships

• Expertise in driving innovation and managing complex technical projects from conception to delivery in an agile environment

• Ability to drive engineering excellence and influence enterprise-level infrastructure strategy

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with a data-driven approach to decision-making

• Proven ability to lead and scale systems engineering functions across multiple teams or a domain

• Experience in talent management, including recruiting, developing, and retaining senior engineering leaders

• Strong understanding of financial implications in decision-making, ensuring responsible use of company resources

We’d love to hear from you if you have…

• 12+ years of progressive experience in systems engineering 

• 5+ years in senior leadership roles managing large systems engineering teams or functions.  

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field 

• Demonstrable experience in setting and executing infrastructure strategy for a significant domain, ensuring stability and performance of critical systems.