IT Operations Director

Smartsuite; Newport Beach (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Capitolis is seeking an IT Operations Director to lead infrastructure and operations, including availability, capacity, monitoring, on‑call, major incident response and the operational budget. You will set standards, runbooks and govern change windows, overseeing the NOC and cloud providers while reporting health and investment needs to the CIO.

You will own the operations calendar, incident and change records, ensuring one source of truth across environments and smooth on‑call escalations.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading IT infrastructure and operations.
• Strong ability to set standards, runbooks and budgets.
• Experience with monitoring, capacity planning and on‑call processes.

Responsibilities

• Own infrastructure and operations strategy, standards and budget.
• Ensure availability, capacity and performance of IT services.
• Oversee monitoring, event management and major incident response.
• Govern change and release windows for stability.
• Report service health and investments to CIO.

Skills

Infrastructure leadership

Cloud operations

NOC management

Incident response

Education

Bachelor's degree in IT/Computing

Tools

ITSM tools

Job description

IT service delivery

SmartSuite for the IT Operations Director

The IT Operations Director leads infrastructure and operations: availability, capacity, monitoring, on-call, major incident response and the operational budget. They set operating standards and runbooks, oversee the NOC and infrastructure teams and report service health, incidents and investment needs to the CIO.

Reports to: Chief Information Officer

What you own

The IT Operations Director leads infrastructure and operations: availability, capacity, monitoring, on-call, major incident response and the operational budget.

• Own infrastructure and operations strategy, standards and budget
• Ensure availability, capacity and performance of IT services
• Oversee monitoring, event management and major incident response
• Govern change and release windows for operational stability
• Manage operational vendors and cloud providers
• Report service health, incidents and investment needs to the CIO

How SmartSuite supports the IT Operations Director

The IT Operations Director leads availability, capacity and major incident response, and the CIO and regulators under FFIEC, DORA or NIS2 expect to know what changed, what broke and what it cost. SmartSuite gives operations one calendar, one incident record and one change history, so service health is read from the record.

Run operations from one calendar and one record

Maintenance, outages and releases on one calendar

The unified operations calendar shows planned maintenance, outages, changes and releases in a shared view, so the NOC, the DevOps Engineer and business stakeholders see the same week and conflicts surface before the window opens.

Every window and outage with an owner

Each change, maintenance window and outage carries a clear owner and status, and standardized records make a release or an outage look the same across teams, so nothing in your operation is unowned.

Escalations that find the right engineer

Automated notifications tell impacted teams and elevate conflicts or overdue tasks, with On-Call Management setting who is reachable, so an alert at night follows the rota you defined rather than the phone list someone remembers.

Stay connected to service management, change and resilience

Changes reviewed for risk before the CAB

Change governance routes operational changes through risk and impact review with approvals, scheduling and CAB-style controls, so the Change and Release Manager and you see the dependency context before a release is approved.

Outages linked to the tickets they caused

Paired with ITSM, outages and changes link to the incidents and service requests they generated, so the IT Service Manager's backlog and your operational record tell one story about what a change actually cost users.

Vendor and cloud dependencies in the service map

Third-party dependency governance tracks how critical services rely on cloud providers and operational vendors, so when a supplier has an incident you know which services are exposed and the IT Risk Manager sees the same map.

Report to the CIO with evidence, not anecdote

Post-event reviews that reduce repeat events

Capture outcomes, follow-ups and improvement actions after every outage or failed change, so the investment case you make to the CIO cites the repeat events the actions were meant to stop.

Who approved what, and when

Audit-ready change history records who approved each change, when it ran and what it impacted, so a regulator's question about an outage under DORA or FFIEC is answered from the record rather than reconstructed.

One operating model across cloud and on-prem

Consistent workflows and dashboards support cloud, hybrid and on-prem operations, so the standards you set for change, release and outage management apply the same way in every environment the Systems Administrator runs.

Monitoring event. Centralizes monitoring events, alerts and operational tasks so the director sees service health across environments.

Incident. Tracks major incidents, escalations and post-incident actions to closure.

Change. Governs change windows and approvals with a record of every operational change.

Continuity. Links DR plans and test results to the services they protect.

Reporting. Reports availability, incident trends and capacity for leadership reviews.

Products this role uses most

Event & Alert Management

Ingest and act on actionable alerts with automated routing, incident triggers, and real-time visibility across systems and services.

IT Incident Management

Detect and resolve IT incidents quickly with structured workflows, SLA tracking, and real-time visibility across systems and service operations.

IT Operations Planning & Analytics

Monitor, analyse, and optimise IT operations with real-time dashboards, performance metrics, and data‑driven planning across services.

Change Management

Plan, approve, and implement changes with workflows, risk controls, and a current view across systems and services.

On-Call Management

Manage on-call schedules, alert routing and escalation workflows so the right responder is notified and incidents are handled within target times.

Industry reference

ITIL 4's infrastructure and platform management, monitoring and event management and incident management practices describe the function; ISO/IEC 20000-1 sets the service management requirements and COBIT 2019's DSS objectives the control view. Regulators examine operations directly: the FFIEC's Operations booklet for banks, DORA's ICT operations and backup rules, NIS2's security and continuity measures for essential entities, HIPAA's contingency planning in healthcare and NIST SP 800-53 operational controls for federal systems. In each case the examiner asks for the same three records: the change calendar with its approvals, the incident timeline with its post-event actions, and the availability and capacity history behind the investment case.

Deepen your knowledge

Guides and definitions from the GRC Knowledge Center and the What-is glossary, chosen for this role.

Frequently asked questions

The IT Operations Director leads infrastructure and operations: the strategy, standards and operational budget, the availability, capacity and performance of IT services, monitoring, event management and major incident response, the change and release windows that protect stability, operational vendors and cloud providers, and the NOC and infrastructure teams. They report service health, incidents and investment needs to the Chief Information Officer, which means they need one view of what is running, what broke and what it will cost.

Event & Alert Management centralises monitoring events, alerts and operational tasks so the director sees service health across environments in one place rather than across several consoles. Alerts become tasks with owners, and On-Call Management covers who is responding. IT Operations Planning & Analytics holds the capacity and planning view alongside, so the question of whether a service is healthy and whether it will stay that way are answered from the same records.

IT Incident Management tracks major incidents, escalations and post-incident actions to closure, so the director can see every open major incident, where it has been escalated and what the post-incident review committed to. The IT Service Manager and Security Operations Manager work from the same incident record, and the actions from the review are traced until done rather than listed in a document. Incident trends then come from the record, not from memory.

Change Management governs change windows and approvals with a record of every operational change, so the Change and Release Manager and the director can see what is scheduled against each window and who approved it. DR plans and test results are linked to the services they protect, so the IT Disaster Recovery Lead's readiness sits beside the services the director is accountable for. Stability is governed from the change record and recovery from the plan record, in one workspace.

SmartSuite reports availability, incident trends and capacity for leadership reviews from the event, incident and planning records as they stand. The IT Operations Director can show the Chief Information Officer how availability is tracking, which services generate repeat incidents and where capacity is tightening, which is the basis for an investment case. The IT Risk Manager sees the same picture for the risk register, so operational and risk reporting describe the same services.

New customers can start with SmartSuite Onboarding, a guided four‑week programme around one or two priority workflows. For an operations team the first workflow is the operations calendar and the incident record: load the service list and the people on call, bring monitoring alerts into the event record so operational tasks are created from them, and run the next major incident in the incident record. Change windows and DR plans follow as each is reviewed, and the people who do the work update the records the director reads.

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