Director, Infrastructure Operations & Strategy (Kennesaw, GA)

Description Artivion Overview: Headquartered in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, Artivion, Inc. is a medical device company focused on developing simple, elegant solutions that address cardiac and vascular surgeons’ most difficult challenges in treating patients with aortic diseases. Artivion’s four major groups of products include: aortic stent grafts, surgical sealants, On-X mechanical heart valves, and implantable cardiac and vascular human tissues. Artivion has over 1,600 employees worldwide with sales representation in over 100 countries. The Company has manufacturing facilities located in Atlanta, Georgia, Austin, Texas and Hechingen, Germany. Additionally, it has sales and distribution offices in various countries throughout Europe, Asia, and South America. For additional information about Artivion, visit our website, www.artivion.com . Position Overview : We are seeking a Director of Infrastructure Operations & Security to provide strategic, operational, financial, and people leadership for enterprise infrastructure operations, engineering, and platform services across servers, storage platforms, cloud connectivity, data center services, monitoring, service restoration, and related resilience capabilities. Cybersecurity remains an enabling discipline, with the Director accountable for ensuring appropriate controls are embedded into infrastructure architecture, operations, lifecycle management, and recovery practices. This role owns the infrastructure operations model, infrastructure roadmap, service reliability objectives, capacity and lifecycle planning, operational support processes, vendor and partner performance, and financial stewardship for the infrastructure portfolio. The Director supports the annual budgeting, forecasting, capital and operating expense planning process, budget variance management, and cost optimization while ensuring infrastructure operations and investments align with business priorities, risk tolerance, and enterprise technology strategy. The successful candidate is expected to lead through managers, engineers, operations teams, and cross-functional partners while remaining sufficiently technical to guide architecture decisions, direct high-severity incident response, and support executive-level communication during critical events. The role balances strategic planning, operational execution, financial discipline, governance, and measurable improvement in service availability, resiliency, performance, scalability, and security posture. Responsibilities : Enterprise Infrastructure Strategy, Engineering & Operations Leadership • Set the multi-year strategy, standards, and operating model for enterprise infrastructure operations and engineering across compute, storage, cloud, data center, and core platform services. • Lead the design, implementation, operation, and modernization of infrastructure services to meet availability, performance, scalability, recoverability, security, and supportability requirements. • Establish governance for architecture decisions, technical standards, lifecycle management, service ownership, operational readiness, change readiness, and production support. • Prioritize infrastructure operations and engineering initiatives based on business value, service reliability, risk reduction, regulatory needs, technical debt, and total cost of ownership. Infrastructure Operations & Service Management • Own day-to-day infrastructure operations, including monitoring, incident response, change execution, service restoration, operational handoffs, and escalation management. • Establish and manage operating metrics for infrastructure services, including availability, performance, capacity, incident trends, change success rates, aging problems, and service-level performance. • Drive operational discipline through standard operating procedures, runbooks, knowledge management, event management, post-incident reviews, and continuous service improvement. • Ensure infrastructure operations are aligned with ITSM practices and integrated with service desk, application, cybersecurity, enterprise architecture, and business continuity processes. • Lead infrastructure operational readiness for new systems, acquisitions, integrations, site changes, manufacturing/plant requirements, and major business or technology initiatives. Financial Management, Budgeting & Cost Optimization • Assist with infrastructure financial planning, including annual operating and capital budgets, multi-year investment planning, forecasting, and budget variance management. • Manage vendor spend, licensing, maintenance contracts, cloud consumption, hardware refresh cycles, managed services, and infrastructure project financials. • Partner with Finance, Procurement, Network, IT leadership, and business stakeholders to build business cases, track ROI, manage accruals, and support funding decisions. • Identify and execute cost optimization opportunities while preserving resilience, compliance, performance, and service quality. Server, Compute & Platform Management • Oversee architecture, build, configuration, patching, performance, capacity planning, operations, and lifecycle management of physical, virtual, and cloud compute environments. • Ensure reliability and operational excellence across Windows, Linux, virtualization, and cloud compute platforms. • Drive standardization, automation, observability, and configuration management across compute environments. Storage, Backup & Data Platform Leadership • Lead architecture and operations of enterprise storage platforms, including SAN, NAS, object, backup, replication, immutable storage, and cloud storage services. • Ensure data durability, recoverability, performance, encryption, retention alignment, and lifecycle management for critical enterprise data. • Define storage tiering, protection, replication, and recovery strategies aligned with business criticality, operational needs, and cost objectives. Resilience, Disaster Recovery & Cyber Recovery • Assist and guide infrastructure disaster recovery, cyber recovery, and business continuity capabilities from a platform, operations, and service-readiness perspective. • Ensure systems are recoverable within defined RTO/RPO targets and that recovery capabilities are tested, documented, operationalized, and continuously improved. • Lead recovery planning and executive communication during high-severity outages, cyber events, operational disruptions, or resilience exercises. People Leadership, Governance & Stakeholder Engagement • Lead, coach, and develop infrastructure engineering and operations teams; establish goals, performance expectations, succession plans, and talent development plans. • Develop clear operating rhythms for service reviews, operations reviews, project governance, financial reviews, incident reviews, problem reviews, and executive reporting. • Serve as a liaison between infrastructure operations, infrastructure engineering, cybersecurity, IT leadership, Finance, Procurement, business leaders, and external partners. • Communicate infrastructure service health, operational risks, financial outlook, project status, and investment priorities to executive leadership. Qualifications: Education & Experience • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or related field; Master's degree preferred. • 12-18 years of progressive experience in infrastructure engineering, infrastructure operations, enterprise platforms, cloud, working knowledge of networking concepts related to systems, data center operations, or related technology leadership roles. • Minimum 5-8 years of people leadership experience, including leadership of managers, senior engineers, operations teams, distributed teams, or vendor/managed service teams. • Demonstrated experience owning departmental or portfolio-level budgets, including capital and operating expense planning, forecasting, budget variance management, vendor spend, managed service costs, and cost optimization. Technical & Operational Leadership • Proven track record building, scaling, modernizing, and operating infrastructure platforms and operations functions across on-premises, hybrid cloud, and cloud-connected environments. • Strong working knowledge of server platforms, virtualization, cloud compute, storage systems, backup/recovery, replication, routing, switching, firewalls, segmentation, SD-WAN, monitoring, observability, and core infrastructure services. • Demonstrated experience leading infrastructure operations, including incident management, problem management, change coordination, service restoration, operational readiness, runbook development, and continuous service improvement. • Ability to operate at the strategic, architectural, operational, and executive communication levels, with enough technical depth to guide decisions during critical incidents. • Strong experience with high availability, fault-tolerant design, performance optimization, capacity planning, disaster recovery architecture, and RTO/RPO ownership. Governance, Financial & Vendor Management • Experience developing infrastructure roadmaps, lifecycle plans, investment cases, operating metrics, service review forums, governance forums, and executive reporting. • Experience managing vendor relationships, contracts, licensing, renewals, service-level commitments, procurement cycles, managed service performance, and operational escalation paths. • Ability to translate technical risk, service needs, operational gaps, and infrastructure debt into clear financial and business recommendations. Security, Compliance & Resilience • Working knowledge of cybersecurity principles applied to infrastructure and infrastructure operations, including hardening, patching, identity and access control, segmentation, vulnerability remediation, logging, monitoring, and encryption. • Familiarity with compliance frameworks such as NIST, ISO 27001, HIPAA, SOX, or related control environments as they apply to infrastructure services and operations. • Demonstrated ability to lead high-severity outage, disaster recovery, cyber recovery, or major operational incident response activities, including technical coordination and executive-level communication. Preferred Credentials • Infrastructure, cloud, working knowledge of networking concepts related to systems, operations, or platform certifications preferred, such as VMware, AWS, Azure, Cisco, ITIL, storage platform, or related certifications. • Security certifications such as CISSP, CISM, or related credentials are helpful but not a primary requirement. Qualifications Skills Required Leadership Advanced Behaviors : Motivations : Education Required Bachelors or better. Experience Required 12-14 years: Progressive experience in infrastructure engineering, infrastructure operations, enterprise platforms, cloud, working knowledge of networking concepts related to systems, data center operations, or related technology leadership roles.