Director, IT Operations

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Director, IT Operations based in Canada.

This is a senior IT leadership role responsible for the reliability, security, and operational performance of a complex technology environment. You will lead the teams, processes, and systems supporting change management, service delivery, infrastructure operations, and operational security. The role combines strategic leadership with hands-on involvement in critical incidents, governance, audits, and executive reporting. You will establish disciplined operating practices, strengthen service quality, and drive continuous improvement across IT operations. Success will be measured through availability, SLA performance, incident reduction, audit readiness, and team development. This is an opportunity to build mature operational capabilities while partnering closely with technology, security, risk, compliance, and business leadership.

Accountabilities

• Own and continuously improve the enterprise change management program, including policies, workflows, approval gates, implementation readiness, rollback planning, and post-change validation.
• Chair the Change Advisory Board (CAB), ensuring production changes are properly assessed, approved, documented, and supported by complete audit trails.
• Lead the IT service desk and end-user support organization, establishing service-level targets for response, resolution, customer satisfaction, and first-contact resolution.
• Oversee employee onboarding and offboarding, device provisioning, access management, and the lifecycle of laptops, peripherals, software, and other IT assets.
• Establish clear Tier 1 through Tier 3 support structures, escalation paths, ownership models, and knowledge-management practices.
• Own the full incident and problem management lifecycle, including detection, triage, escalation, resolution, executive communication, root cause analysis, and corrective actions.
• Coordinate cross-functional responses to critical Sev 1 and Sev 2 incidents and provide regular availability, outage, and operational trend reporting to senior leadership.
• Oversee 24x7 monitoring, alerting, observability, and operational readiness across production and corporate environments.
• Manage monitoring and incident-response technologies such as Splunk, Datadog, PagerDuty, Site24x7, Jira, and Confluence, ensuring strong detection coverage and effective on-call practices.
• Partner with engineering and infrastructure teams to confirm new services meet operational, monitoring, and support requirements before production release.
• Maintain operational readiness for SOC, PCI, and other applicable compliance and audit frameworks, including access controls, change controls, evidence gathering, and control attestations.
• Manage technology vendors, managed service providers, procurement forecasts, software licensing, IT assets, and operational cost accountability.
• Build, lead, coach, and develop a multidisciplinary IT operations team while establishing performance standards, career paths, accountability, and a culture of continuous improvement.

Requirements

• 10+ years of progressive IT experience, including at least 5 years in IT operations leadership or management.
• Demonstrated experience owning a formal change management program, including CAB leadership, governance, documentation, and audit accountability.
• Strong track record managing 24x7 IT operations, critical incident response, problem management, and SLA-driven service delivery.
• Experience supporting SOC, PCI, or comparable security and compliance frameworks with measurable audit and compliance outcomes.
• Hands-on familiarity with modern monitoring, observability, ticketing, and collaboration platforms such as Splunk, Datadog, PagerDuty, Site24x7, Jira, and Confluence.
• Strong understanding of ITIL-aligned Incident, Change, and Problem Management practices.
• Proven ability to build operational processes and governance structures from the ground up and translate operational metrics into clear executive-level reporting.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work effectively with engineers, auditors, executives, and business stakeholders.
• ITIL v3/v4 Foundation certification or higher is preferred.
• Experience working in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, fintech, or payments is an advantage.
• Experience leading or supporting M&A integrations, ERP transitions, or major platform migrations is preferred.
• A career background combining hands-on technical expertise with progressive IT operations leadership is highly valued.
• Strong leadership, coaching, decision-making, and problem-solving abilities, with a focus on accountability, service quality, and measurable outcomes.

Benefits

• Competitive salary of 100,000-130,000, depending on experience.
• Fully remote working arrangement.
• Opportunity to lead and shape a broad, enterprise-level IT operations function.
• Exposure to modern monitoring, service management, security, compliance, and operational technologies.
• Career growth opportunities within a technology-focused environment.
• Opportunity to build and develop a high-performing, multidisciplinary IT operations team.