Job Summary
We are seeking an experienced Data Center Lead to oversee data center operations, infrastructure management, technical delivery, and service reliability across enterprise environments. The ideal candidate will have strong experience managing data center facilities and IT infrastructure, leading technical teams, coordinating vendors, and ensuring high availability, security, and operational excellence.
The Data Center Lead will work closely with infrastructure, network, cloud, security, facilities, and application teams to support critical business services and drive data center modernization initiatives.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead day-to-day data center operations, infrastructure support, and service delivery.
- Manage and coordinate teams responsible for servers, storage, networking, virtualization, backup, and data center infrastructure.
- Own data center capacity planning, availability, performance, and operational readiness.
- Coordinate installation, configuration, migration, relocation, and decommissioning of IT infrastructure.
- Develop and maintain data center operational procedures, standards, runbooks, and documentation.
- Partner with Network, Systems, Cloud, Security, Facilities, and Application teams on infrastructure initiatives.
- Lead data center migration, consolidation, expansion, and modernization projects.
- Manage infrastructure changes, maintenance activities, incidents, and problem-management processes.
- Ensure compliance with enterprise security, availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity requirements.
- Monitor infrastructure health and coordinate resolution of critical incidents and service-impacting issues.
- Manage relationships with data center providers, hardware vendors, managed service providers, and other third parties.
- Review vendor performance, SLAs, operational metrics, and service delivery commitments.
- Support disaster recovery and business continuity planning, testing, and implementation.
- Establish and track operational KPIs, service-level metrics, capacity utilization, and infrastructure health.
- Identify opportunities to improve automation, standardization, reliability, and operational efficiency.
- Provide technical leadership during major infrastructure changes, outages, and recovery events.
- Prepare status reports, risk assessments, project updates, and executive-level communications.
Required Technical Skills
- Strong experience with enterprise data center infrastructure and operations.
- Hands-on knowledge of:
- Compute / Server Infrastructure
- Storage Systems
- Enterprise Networking
- Virtualization technologies
- Backup and Disaster Recovery
- Monitoring and Infrastructure Management
- Experience with VMware / Hyper-V or equivalent virtualization platforms.
- Knowledge of Windows and Linux server environments.
- Understanding of enterprise network technologies including LAN/WAN, routing, switching, firewalls, and load balancing.
- Experience working with cloud and hybrid infrastructure environments, preferably AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Familiarity with automation and infrastructure-as-code concepts such as PowerShell, Python, Ansible, or Terraform.
- Strong understanding of high-availability architectures, redundancy, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery.
- Experience with IT service management processes including Incident, Problem, Change, and Configuration Management.
Data Center / Facilities Knowledge
- Understanding of data center power, cooling, rack management, cabling, and physical infrastructure.
- Familiarity with UPS, generators, PDU, HVAC, environmental monitoring, and physical security systems.
- Experience with data center capacity, rack space, power utilization, and environmental planning.
- Knowledge of data center standards, operational controls, and security practices.
- Experience coordinating physical installations, equipment moves, adds, changes, and removals.
Leadership & Management Skills
- Proven experience leading cross-functional infrastructure teams.
- Strong vendor and stakeholder management capabilities.
- Excellent communication and escalation-management skills.
- Ability to manage multiple infrastructure projects and operational priorities simultaneously.
- Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and decision-making abilities.
- Experience preparing executive-level reports and presenting technical information to business stakeholders.
- Ability to work effectively in high-availability and mission-critical environments.
Preferred Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.
- ITIL certification is preferred.
- PMP, PRINCE2, or equivalent project-management certification is a plus.
- Relevant data center, cloud, virtualization, networking, or infrastructure certifications are preferred.
- Experience working with enterprise-scale or Tier III / Tier IV data center environments is highly desirable.
Key Success Measures
- High availability and reliability of data center infrastructure.
- Successful delivery of migrations, upgrades, and infrastructure projects.
- Effective incident and problem resolution.
- Compliance with operational, security, and disaster recovery standards.
- Improved infrastructure efficiency, capacity utilization, and operational performance.
- Strong vendor performance and adherence to SLAs.
- Consistent delivery of data center services with minimal business disruption.