Director of Engineering

JOB SUMMARY

Reporting to the VP of Infrastructure, the IT Director of Engineering provides strategic and operational leadership for the organization's Network, Firewall, Azure Infrastructure, and Telecom teams. This role is accountable for the architecture, reliability, security, scalability, and lifecycle management of enterprise infrastructure services that support corporate offices, service centers, remote workers, and operating locations.

The Director translates business requirements into practical engineering roadmaps, builds high-performing technical teams, strengthens operational resilience, and ensures infrastructure investments deliver measurable improvements in availability, security, performance, user experience, and cost efficiency. The position partners closely with Information Security, Enterprise Applications, Service Delivery, Finance, Compliance, and business leaders, and may require travel to company locations and participation in major-incident response.

DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES

• Provide leadership, direction, and accountability for the Network, Firewall, Azure Infrastructure, and Telecom teams, including organizational design, workforce planning, recruiting, coaching, succession planning, performance management, and technical development.

• Develop and maintain a multi-year infrastructure engineering strategy and roadmap aligned with business growth, acquisitions, cybersecurity requirements, cloud adoption, financial objectives, and operational risk tolerance.

• Own enterprise network architecture and operations, including LAN, WAN, wireless, SD-WAN, DNS, DHCP, IP address management, remote access, internet connectivity, carrier services, and connectivity for offices, service centers, cloud environments, and acquired locations.

• Own firewall and network-security engineering, including policy governance, segmentation, secure remote access, VPN, intrusion prevention, web application protection, rule lifecycle management, configuration standards, vulnerability remediation, and coordination with the Information Security team.

• Lead Azure infrastructure architecture and operations, including subscriptions, management groups, landing zones, identity integration, networking, compute, storage, backup, disaster recovery, monitoring, governance, policy, automation, and cost optimization.

• Provide leadership for enterprise telecom services, including Microsoft Teams Phone or equivalent unified communications platforms, voice carriers, contact-center integrations, toll-free services, emergency calling, number management, call routing, and telecom expense management.

• Establish and enforce engineering standards, reference architectures, configuration baselines, documentation requirements, lifecycle standards, and design-review practices across all assigned technology domains.

• Ensure infrastructure availability and resilience through capacity planning, proactive monitoring, redundancy, backup and recovery testing, disaster recovery exercises, patching, vulnerability remediation, hardware and software lifecycle management, and removal of unsupported technology.

• Serve as the senior escalation and incident leader for critical infrastructure outages and security events. Ensure timely stakeholder communications, business-impact assessment, technical coordination, restoration of service, root-cause analysis, and completion of corrective actions.

• Strengthen operational discipline through ITIL-aligned incident, problem, change, configuration, and service management practices. Ensure high-risk changes receive appropriate technical review, testing, implementation planning, rollback planning, and post-implementation validation.

• Manage infrastructure budgets, forecasts, contracts, licensing, cloud consumption, carrier spend, and vendor performance. Identify opportunities to reduce total cost of ownership without creating unacceptable service, security, or resilience risk.

• Lead infrastructure due diligence and integration for acquisitions, divestitures, new locations, relocations, and major business initiatives, including discovery, risk assessment, connectivity, security, migration, cutover, and stabilization planning.

• Define and report meaningful service and engineering metrics, including availability, latency, capacity, incident trends, mean time to restore, change success rate, lifecycle compliance, security remediation, Azure cost performance, carrier performance, and roadmap delivery.

• Communicate infrastructure priorities, risks, architecture decisions, investment needs, and operational performance clearly to technical teams, business leaders, executive leadership, auditors, and other stakeholders.

• Ensure services comply with applicable company policies, contractual requirements, data-protection obligations, and healthcare-related security and privacy requirements, including HIPAA where applicable.

• Perform other job-related duties as assigned and provide hands-on technical leadership when business-critical conditions require it.

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work performed by this position. They are not an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, or qualifications. The employee may be asked to perform other job-related duties consistent with the role.

JOB REQUIREMENTS

Education and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent combination of education and directly relevant experience.

• Eight or more years of progressive experience in infrastructure engineering or operations, including at least five years leading technical teams or managers in a complex, multi-site enterprise environment.

• Demonstrated experience leading enterprise network, firewall/security infrastructure, Microsoft Azure infrastructure, and telecom or unified communications functions.

• Experience developing technology roadmaps, leading major infrastructure transformations, managing operating and capital budgets, and governing strategic vendors and service providers.

• Experience supporting distributed locations and a mobile or remote workforce. Experience in healthcare, home health, hospice, post-acute care, or another regulated industry is strongly preferred.

• Experience with mergers and acquisitions, infrastructure integrations, data-center or cloud migrations, disaster recovery, and critical-incident leadership is preferred.

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

• Strong working knowledge of routing, switching, wireless, SD-WAN, DNS/DHCP, virtual private networks, network segmentation, high availability, performance monitoring, and carrier connectivity.

• Strong working knowledge of enterprise firewall platforms and security controls such as next-generation firewalls, intrusion prevention, secure remote access, web application firewalls, DDoS protection, zero-trust principles, policy governance, and security logging.

• Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Azure architecture and governance, including landing zones, subscriptions, management groups, Azure Policy, role-based access control, virtual networks, ExpressRoute or VPN connectivity, compute, storage, backup, recovery, monitoring, and cost management.

• Working knowledge of enterprise voice and collaboration services, Session Border Controllers, SIP services, call routing, emergency calling, contact-center integrations, and telecom carriers.

• Ability to evaluate architecture trade-offs and balance security, reliability, performance, maintainability, speed, and cost.

• Proven ability to lead through major incidents, ambiguous conditions, competing priorities, and organizational change while maintaining clear decision-making and executive communication.

• Strong financial and vendor-management skills, including budgeting, forecasting, contract review, licensing analysis, cloud cost management, and service-level accountability.

• Strong written, verbal, and presentation skills, with the ability to communicate technical risks and recommendations in business terms.

• Demonstrated commitment to documentation, automation, standardization, continuous improvement, service ownership, customer experience, and measurable outcomes.

• Ability to participate in after-hours escalation as needed, support planned maintenance windows, and travel to company locations based on business needs.

• Relevant certifications such as Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Azure Network Engineer Associate, Cisco CCNP/CCIE, Palo Alto Networks PCNSE, Fortinet FCSS, ITIL 4, or comparable credentials are preferred, not required.

• Positive attitude and commitment to the Company's culture, core values, ethical standards, privacy expectations, and service-oriented operating model.
  

Location: Hybrid, TN

Why Join Us?

Something else that sets us apart from other companies is the quality of our most valuable resources – our people! We are dedicated to living out our culture as defined by our core values, “CAPLICO”:

• Customer Second – We prioritize and support our team so they can deliver exceptional care.

• Accountability – Own your work and outcomes.

• Passion for Learning – Grow continuously with curiosity and culture.

• Love One Another – Build authentic, respectful, and trusting relationships.

• Intelligent Risk Taking – Innovate and challenge the status quo.

• Celebrate – Recognize the small wins, they add up!

• Ownership – Be the CEO of your role.

Additional Benefits:

• True Work-Life balance – We believe in taking care of yourself before you take care of others!

• Full benefits package (medical, dental, vision, 401(k) with match)

• Paid time off, holiday pay, and professional development

• Your voice matters! - Work with other passionate and high-achieving leaders who care deeply about patient outcomes and team success.

About Pennant Services

We support over 250 home health, hospice, senior living, and home care operations across 19 states. Our Service Center model empowers local leadership while providing centralized clinical, legal, HR, IT, and compliance support to help ensure high-quality care.

www.pennantgroup.com

Pennant Group is one of the most dynamic and progressive companies in the rapidly expanding senior living, home health, hospice, and home care industries. Affiliates of Pennant now operate more than 250 senior living, home health, hospice, and home care operations across 16 states and we are growing! These operations have no corporate headquarters or traditional management hierarchy. Instead, they operate independently with support from the “Service Center,” a world-class service team that provides the centralized clinical, legal, risk management, HR, training, accounting, IT and other resources necessary to allow on-site leaders and caregivers to focus squarely on day-to-day care and business issues in their individual agencies. More information about Pennant is available at https://pennantgroup.com/.

Something else that sets us apart from other companies is the quality of our most valuable resources – our people! We are dedicated to living out our culture as defined by our core values, CAPLICO:

Customer Second
Accountability
Passion for Learning
Love One Another
Intelligent Risk Taking
Celebrate
Ownership

By incorporating these principles at all levels of our organization, our employees feel valued and excited about their impact on our service center team members and operational partners. Our culture fosters excellence both personally and professionally and promotes development that leads to continued success.

We are an equal opportunity employer committed to ensuring that all conditions and privileges of employment, including recruitment, hiring, evaluation, transfer, promotion, discipline, determination of compensation and/or benefits, and termination of employment, for all job classifications, are based on qualifications and work record. No employment decision is made, nor do we discriminate, on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, sex/pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, veteran status, or disability.