Managing Director, Technology Operations

aeci; Springfield (MO); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Associated Electric Cooperative is building a single, unified Technology Operations Center and seeks a proven leader to orchestrate the transformation of IT operations across cyber, physical security, platform, product, and workforce technology.

You will report to the Chief Information Officer and form the TechOps organization with two existing centers, guiding engineering talent and business partners through a program of reliability and performance improvements.

Job description

At Associated Electric Cooperative, we're committed to providing reliable energy to the communities we serve with passion and precision. We're a tight-knit team dedicated to keeping the lights on and the energy flowing smoothly across our expansive network!

From technical to operational to professional disciplines, our team brings a wide variety of skills, talents, and expertise to the table. We believe in both dedicating ourselves to excellence and investing in your growth.

We're building something new at Associated. Most organizations approach IT operations by creating separate operations centers for everything: network ops, cyber ops, infrastructure ops, cloud ops, 24-7 service desk...you get the idea. The result is many teams, many platforms, many approaches, and no one able to see the full picture of the enterprise.

We're throwing that playbook away. We're going to do what's never been done before. We're going to build one unified technology operations center -a single control room for all Associated's technology.

And we need you to lead the effort.

Associated Electric operates one of the most technologically sophisticated electric systems in the country for our members. Two data centers. Cloud platforms. Modern enterprise applications. AI in the hands of our employees. Hundreds of critical technology systems supporting 24-7 generation, transmission, and energy trading along with many other business functions. We've even built two operations centers for cyber and physical security, with our cyber operations center providing managed services to over 50 member cooperatives.

Our foundation is strong and ready to be taken to the next level through your transformation of our IT operations. Reporting to the Chief Information Officer, you will form our new Technology Operations function, responsible for the reliability and performance of the technology of Associated, the continuity of business functions, and the productivity of our users.

This will be a tough problem to solve. Control rooms rely on control systems, but there is no commercial product on the market that we can deploy to be the control system for enterprise technology. Every product on the market sees just a small picture: network, hosting, applications, devices. Therefore, in addition to building the operations functions, you must build something that doesn't exist anywhere else - the platform it all runs on.

You won't be starting from scratch. Associated's CIO sponsored a cross-functional team that has spent the past nine months forming the vision for TechOps. They validated a minimum-viable business model, built the business case, and secured initial funding. We're now set to form the TechOps organization itself with the two existing operations centers, additional support and engineering talent moving onto this team, and many of the people who built this vision in the first place. All that remains is you to lead it.

Here's what you'll do:

• Form Technology Operations: Bring cyber operations and physical security operations together for the first time, and fuse them with platform, product, and workforce technology support into one organization with a shared mission and culture. Help some already great teams become one great organization.
• Run the Operation: Lead operations from day one so nothing pauses while you build, then grow the operation as you onboard systems. Ensure the business can trust TechOps when our grid control center or trading floor technology degrades at 3 a.m. - or when SharePoint goes down and hundreds of employees face losing a morning of productivity. Make TechOps the organization that handles an issue, an incident, or a genuine crisis with the same steadiness.
• Define the Operating Model: Define how the work happens across teams that have never worked as one - tiers and escalation, handoffs between protection and business operations, what the central floor handles versus field response at our locations, and the service definitions the business can depend on. Create one model from many.
• Build the Control System: Own the platform that powers Technology Operations: vision, roadmap, funding, and long-term evolution. Your organization builds the pipelines, alarms, and dashboards that let you understand the health of the enterprise in real time-and the AI-infused playbooks and automation that power response and recovery.
• Onboard the Enterprise : Hundreds of systems don't arrive under monitoring at once. Build the intake path - consulting services to help product teams instrument their systems, define ownership, thresholds, and runbooks - and ensure correct onboarding priority. Every system onboarded makes the picture more complete.
• Expand the Services: Grow beyond monitoring and response into what the business needs next - enterprise business continuity, disaster recovery, operational readiness, proactive health and capacity management, and coordination with the technology partners our operations depend on. Build the roadma