Corporate Systems Director, IT

PenFed Credit Union; Washington, Baltimore (District of Columbia, MD); Hybrid; USD 122,000 - 244,000; Full time

Job summary

PenFed Credit Union is seeking a Hybrid Corporate Systems Director, IT to lead corporate systems, production control, and related technology teams. You will drive modernization, ensure system stability, and align IT initiatives with business goals while serving on the senior IT leadership team.

Responsibilities include governance, KPI reporting, incident management, and vendor oversight. The role emphasizes collaboration with executives and adoption of AI to improve delivery and talent

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in technology/engineering.
• 8–10 years in Corporate Systems with 4–6 years in a leadership role, preferably in financial services.
• 2–4 yrs of direct people management responsibility.
• Experience in implementing/maintaining PeopleSoft/Nautilus systems.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• High proficiency in creating and presenting management reports/dashboards.
• Experience using AI tools is preferred.

Responsibilities

• Provide strategic leadership for corporate systems and modernization efforts.
• Partner with business leaders to align technology initiatives with goals.
• Oversee governance, changes, incidents, problems, and performance.
• Establish KPIs, dashboards, and reporting to monitor service health.
• Oversee vulnerability management and prevention of repeat issues.
• Coordinate IT governance, risk, audits, and vendor relationships.
• Manage contracts, SLAs, and third-party service providers.

Skills

Communication

Stakeholder management

Problem solving

Dashboards

AI tools

Education

Bachelor's degree in technology/engineering

Tools

PeopleSoft

Nautilus

UiPath

Job description

Job Overview

PenFed is hiring a (Hybrid) Corporate Systems Director, IT at our Tysons, Virginia location. The primary responsibility for this role is to act as a strategic leader of corporate systems technology to lead our corporate systems, enterprise production control and other technology teams. This critical role is responsible for the overall business project delivery and modernization strategy of our Corporate Systems, ensuring its stability and performance as it continues to support essential business operations. This leader will act as a key liaison, engaging business leaders to align technology initiatives with organizational goals and guarantee the delivery of world-class technology support. This role will serve as a member of the senior IT leadership team in shaping business and IT strategy, making investment and priority trade-off decisions, reducing unit costs, negotiating and managing vendor contracts, adopting AI approach to delivery and improving employee talent, commitment and morale.

Job Overview

PenFed is hiring a (Hybrid) Corporate Systems Director, IT at our Tysons, Virginia location. The primary responsibility for this role is to act as a strategic leader of corporate systems technology to lead our corporate systems, enterprise production control and other technology teams. This critical role is responsible for the overall business project delivery and modernization strategy of our Corporate Systems, ensuring its stability and performance as it continues to support essential business operations. This leader will act as a key liaison, engaging business leaders to align technology initiatives with organizational goals and guarantee the delivery of world-class technology support. This role will serve as a member of the senior IT leadership team in shaping business and IT strategy, making investment and priority trade-off decisions, reducing unit costs, negotiating and managing vendor contracts, adopting AI approach to delivery and improving employee talent, commitment and morale. This leader will help improve system availability, resiliency, security and stability through prevention of issues causing unavailability, detecting through effective monitoring and early intervention, managing the outage calls with all the stakeholders efficiently and purposefully. This role is critical in ensuring continuous improvement of corporate systems covering enterprise systems like PeopleSoft, Nautilus, UiPath and Production Control. The leader ensures effective vulnerability management, reporting & tracking, and deploy efficient strategies to prevent repeat issues. The job requires extensive experience in leading and maturing corporate system processes, specifically in Production Control, Batch Job execution, UiPath BOTs, Peoplesoft, Nautilus systems. This position will work with IT Governance, Business Resiliency, Audit, vendors, business stakeholders, Information security, infrastructure, PenFed senior management and other IT teams to stabilize and mature system health.

Responsibilities

Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. This is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of job duties, and the position will perform other duties as assigned.

Strategic Leadership & Systems Management

• Modernization Strategy: Develop and execute a thoughtful, phased strategy for the continued support, enhancement, and eventual modernization of platforms, ensuring business continuity throughout the lifecycle.
• Budget & Resource Allocation: Manage the technology budget for the platform area, making strategic investment decisions on tooling, infrastructure, and personnel.
• Vendor Management: Oversee relationships with all key technology partners and vendors related to the platforms and associated infrastructure.
• Thought Leadership: Brings thought leadership to long-range strategy planning and leads policy development to address complex business issues.

Business Alignment & Stakeholder Management

• Executive Partnership: Act as the primary technology point of contact for business unit leaders. Translate complex technical platform issues into clear business impacts and solutions.
• Stakeholder Management: Communicates effectively with peers and team members to meet division objectives. Staying in constant touch with business partners, understanding their needs, comes up with effective solutions leveraging the investments made already. Proactively identifies & addresses issues to avoid escalations & reactive issue resolution.
• Own and drive the strategy, governance, and execution of application management functions for the corporate systems area, including the management of the lifecycle of changes, incidents and associated problems.
• Establish KPIs, dashboards, and reporting mechanisms to monitor service health and drive accountability.
• Oversee the vulnerability management process, ensuring timely and effective resolution of high‑severity vulnerabilities and deploy strategies to prevent them in future.
• Coordinate, monitor, and support general activities related to systems upkeep, business queries, incidents, problems and changes. Facilitate daily, weekly and monthly meetings with stakeholders. Escalate concerns through the appropriate process to minimize business impact with a key objective of First Time Right
• Production Control - Identify production environment stability trends. Analysis of the incidents as well as recurring alerts, to identify the associated root causes and develop plans and actions to resolve and eliminate these problems at all Severity Levels.
• Work with IT Governance, Business Resiliency, Audit, Vendors, Business Stakeholders, PenFed Senior Management and other IT teams.
• Manage relationships with third party service providers, ensuring contractual obligations, SLAs, and performance standards are met.
• Conduct regular service reviews and performance evaluations with vendors.
• Collaborate with procurement and legal teams for contract negotiations and renewals.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in technology/engineering
• Minimum of 8-10 years of experience in Corporate Systems, ERP systems, Batch environment management, with at least 4-6 years in a leadership role, preferably in financial services.
• 2-4 yrs of direct people management responsibility
• Experience in implementation/maintenance of Peoplesoft/Nautilus systems
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and problem-solving skills
• High proficiency with creating and presenting management summary reports and Dashboards.
• Require excellent customer service, oral and written communication skills.
• Basic knowledge and experience in using enterprise level monitoring tools and dashboards.
• Experience using A.I. tools, working with teams leveraging AI tools preferred.

Supervisory Responsibility

This position will supervise employees.

Licenses and Certifications

PMP, Six Sigma preferred.

Work Environment

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly exposed to an indoor office setting with moderate noise.

*Most roles require working in an office setting with moderate noise and the ability to lift 25 pounds.*

Travel

Limited travel to various worksites is required.

Pay Transparency

The anticipated starting salary range for this role is $ 121,800 .00 - $ 243,796.00

This position is eligible for an organizational performance based annual bonus, subject to board discretion and approval.

This position is eligible for an individual performance based annual bonus.

Benefits

At PenFed, we offer a robust benefits package designed to support you both personally and professionally. You'll have access to comprehensive health, dental, and vision plans; paid time off; and family-friendly benefits like paid parental leave, care support, and fitness center access. Financial wellness is encouraged through features like a 401(k) match, employee loan discounts, and fully paid life and disability coverage. We also support growth via education assistance, community involvement, and volunteer opportunities.

Our Purpose

Helping members achieve their dreams since 1935. Pentagon Federal Credit Union (PenFed) is one of America's largest federal credit unions, serving 2.8 million members worldwide with $29 billion in assets. PenFed offers market-leading certificates, checking and savings, credit cards, personal loans, mortgages, auto loans, and a wide range of other financial services, always with members' interests in mind. PenFed is federally insured by the NCUA and is an Equal Housing Lender.

Equal Employment Opportunity

PenFed management will maintain and observe personnel policies which will not discriminate or permit harassment or retaliation against a person because of race, color, creed, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, religion, national origin, ancestry, marital status, military or veteran status or obligation, the presence of a physical and/or mental disability or medical condition, genetic information, sexual orientation, and all statuses protected by applicable state or local law in all recruiting, hiring, training, compensation, overtime, position classifications, work assignments, facilities, promotions, transfers, employee treatment, and in all other terms and conditions of employment. PenFed will also prohibit retaliation against individuals for raising a complaint of discrimination or harassment or participating in an investigation of same. PenFed will also reasonably accommodate qualified individuals with a disability so that they can apply for a job or perform the essential functions of a job unless doing so causes a direct threat to these individuals or others in the workplace and the threat cannot be eliminated by reasonable accommodation or if the accommodation creates an undue hardship to PenFed. Contact human resources (HR) with any questions or requests for accommodation at [e-mail].