Director, IT

• Requisition no: 511976
• Work type: Full Time
• Location: Medical Center
• School/Department: Institute for Genomic Medicine
• Grade: Grade 106
• Categories: Information Technology

• Job Type: Officer of Administration
• Regular/Temporary: Regular
• Hours Per Week: 35

Position Summary

The Institute for Genomic Medicine (IGM) at Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) is a unique interdisciplinary research environment specializing in human genetics and genomics.

We are looking for an exceptional and experienced Director of IT to direct and oversee the design, planning, deployment and support of mission-critical IT solutions for IGM and Precision Genomics Laboratory. The Director will also be responsible for Institute compliance with CUIMC information technology office, CUIMC policies, principles and guidelines and will establish and maintain liaison with representatives of other University computer operations to do so. He/She will additionally manage desktop and end-point support for all IGM personnel, coordinate regularly with departmental users to ensure that infrastructure and technology are current, meet all the requirements and supported accordingly.

The Director will oversee the high performance compute environment, multi-tiered storage, and backup, as well as the operation, support and maintenance of our data center. The Director will ensure all deployments, upgrades, capacity planning, backup strategies, as well as software/hardware integration planning. He/She will manage vendors for deployment of new technology and solutions for the Institute, which will include a new high performance cluster and cloud solutions to support a growing cloud presence.

Responsibilities

• Provide leadership and guidance including the development of overall information technology strategy within IGM;
• Analyze the current architecture to identify weaknesses and develop opportunities for improvements; Assess near-term needs to establish business priorities;
• Develop long-term strategic goals for IGM IT infrastructure in conjunction with data owners and department managers including migration to cloud services;
• Author, implement, execute, and periodically update System Security, Business Continuity, and Disaster Recovery Plans to be consistent with CUIMC policies and standards regarding security and HIPAA compliance; Ensure all measures are in place to support HIPAA, CUIMC, and IGM Security guidelines;
• Actively monitors the systems; Troubleshoots, isolates, and resolves application, system and other technical problems (hardware, software, and network).
• Primary contact in an on-call rotation that provides 24x7x365 coverage of mission critical functions;
• Design, implement, configure, maintain, and support the IGM high performance computing and storage environment; Maintain mission-critical IGM computing operations: including a computing cluster of over 2000 CPU cores and ~7 PB of storage, large database systems and several AWS Cloud services;
• Provides guidance and assistance to the team for system performance optimization. Designs and develops scripts for system administration, monitoring and usage reporting.
• Researches, deploys and optimizes resource management and scheduling software and policies. Develops and implements storage policies.
• Further the adoption of Cloud technologies across the enterprise to enable new and evolving business and operating models.
• Remain informed on storage regulations, trends, and issues, including current and emerging technologies and best practices; advise, counsel, and educate executive and management teams on their relative importance;
• Oversee transfer of data between IGM research collaborators
• Provides key input to short and long-term department strategy and budget planning through performance of cost/benefit analysis for existing and proposed technology used by the Institute, and forecasting the direction of any future technology or current technology refresh. Plans purchases, updates and optimizations of all IT infrastructure.
• Manage purchases and relationships between IGM and technology vendors on all Hardware/Software and services;
• Liaison between IGM and CUIMC IT and CU IT on all aspect of IT Support;
• Administer, validate, and review user and system accounts, access controls, audit logs and system integrity to maximize system security and data confidentiality
• Mentors team members based on experience and knowledge of computer organization, storage systems, network, software stack, and operating systems in HPC environment.
• Further development of SOPs for IT staff.
• Works well on a team and across teams and with researchers. Clear communicator with all.
• Performs other related duties as assigned.

Minimum Qualifications

• Requires bachelor's degree in Computer Science/Information Systems or equivalent in education and experience
• 8 years experience in information technology; expert Linux systems administration skills with a minimum of 5 years of experience within a systems administration role, preferably within a heterogeneous environment consisting of several subsystems and 3 years of demonstrated leadership experience

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in applicable field preferred and progressive experience in an academic research environment, preferably within a medical education health care setting.

Other Requirements

• Experience managing and engineering a diverse data center environment consisting of an HPC cluster and high-volume storage systems. Experience managing NetApp systems is a plus.
• Thorough understanding of network setup and configuration, with the ability to troubleshoot and solve network bottlenecks
• A minimum of 3 years of experience of shell and python or perl scripting, preferably while integrating with a source code versioning system (git or subversion)
• Extensive experience designing and maintaining Linux virtual environments (RHV/oVirt/KVM), containers, and system automation.
• Relational database management experience (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle)
• Experience with AWS and GCP cloud computing
• Familiarity with Apache Hadoop
• Proven ability to read, understand, and apply technical documentation, and to learn new technologies quickly
• Ability to multi-task and prioritize effectively
• Willingness to work within a team in a quickly evolving environment. Demonstrated ability to plan, execute, and close out multi-person projects within established deadlines.
• Outstanding customer service skills
• Ability to communicate effectively with team members and customers, both verbally and through documentation
• Proven experience working with company leadership and delivery teams in an influential role to establish a vision and deliver architectural results. Must be capable of leading and facilitating groups of business and/or technical team members to solve problems and deliver change into the organization

Equal Opportunity Employer / Disability / Veteran

Columbia University is committed to the hiring of qualified local residents.

Applications open: Dec 15 2020 Eastern Standard Time
Applications close: