Director of IT Operations and Enterprise Applications

SUMMARY 

The Director of IT Operations and Enterprise Applications will join the Technology team in a dynamic and growing Alternative Investments firm with a strong technology focus. This role is accountable for all IT Operations, including Cloud Infrastructure, On-Premise Infrastructure (what little there is left), and all End User Compute, including our Service Desk. This role is also accountable for our enterprise applications and the strategy to supports the selection and ongoing maturation of these applications such as Zoom, the Microsoft productivity suite, OpenAI services, and more. Across the disciplines, this role oversees approximately 16 people plus partner services providing off-hours support. 

As an onsite/hybrid employee, you are expected to be in the Chicago office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursday. 

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES  

Strategic Leadership: 

• Develop and execute a vision and strategy for IT operations aligned with the organization's goals. 
• Establish, monitor, and achieve key performance indicators (KPIs) for IT service delivery and infrastructure management. 
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.
• Create a new function accountable for the strategy and ongoing administration as well as incremental improvement of our key enterprise platforms. 

Operational Management: 

• Lead, mentor, and manage the Service Desk and IT Infrastructure / Cloud Engineering teams. 
• Establish the Enterprise Application function, leveraging resources from the existing IT Operations disciplines. 
• Ensure the availability, performance, and security of IT systems and services. 
• Oversee incident, problem, and change management processes to ensure minimal disruption to the business. 
• Manage relationships with third-party vendors and service providers, as needed. 

Service Desk Excellence: 

• Ensure a customer-centric approach to IT support services. 
• Establish and uphold SLOs to meet or exceed user expectations. 
• Implement, maintain, and increment tools and processes to improve service desk efficiency and reporting – including the introduction of agentic AI capabilities. 

EDUCATION, SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENTS 

The ideal experience and critical competencies for this role include the following: 

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or a related field. 
• 8+ years of progressive experience in IT operations, with 4+ years in a leadership role. 
• Proven expertise in managing IT infrastructure, cloud environments (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), Microsoft Productivity Suite (M365) and service desk operations. 
• Strong knowledge of ITIL, DevOps, and agile methodologies. 
• Excellent leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills. 
• Demonstrated ability to drive change and deliver results in a fast-paced environment. 

OUR CULTURE 

Technology plays a critical role at GCM Grosvenor, enabling our team members to make timely, data-driven decisions in support of our clients. The technology we create enables our team to deploy $80B+ in the most efficient, intelligent, risk-managed way. Now is an exciting time to join the firm and the Alts industry as a technology leader. We are in rapid digitization, leveraging technology to transform business processes and bring new capabilities to this industry. We are building modern data infrastructure on which AI-enabled solutions can be built or deployed which will contribute to the next phase of growth.  

We are not afraid to think differently. Embrace new ideas. Dream big. Welcome change. We are a culture of empowerment, accountability, high performance, transparency, and trust. Successful team members are self-motivated and energized by working alongside thoughtful and smart colleagues in a fast-paced environment. Individuals who thrive on this team enjoy being a part of an organization focused on excellence. We look for naturally collaborative individuals who enjoy interacting at all levels of the organization. 

Our IT infrastructure is almost entirely public cloud hosted, with presence in AWS and Azure. We manage our infrastructure and our end user compute with code. We have a DevOps culture with a strong focus on automation, testability, and maintainability. The ideal candidate should have some engineering experience, plenty of leadership and people management experience, must enjoy working with optimized development processes in an environment that leverages SRE practices, and must be seeking a highly collaborative environment where you will play a role in end user support and escalations. 

At a Glance - GCM’s Technology Organization 

• A hybrid and geographically distributed team 
• A strong team culture inside and outside the office 
• Teams are empowered to deliver product requirements through cross functional team ownership 
• We are product-driven and thrive on overt transparency 

OUR TECHNOLOGY 

• 95% public cloud hosted (Azure & AWS), with an emphasis on PaaS services 
• Mostly a Microsoft shop, though diversifying by the day (Azure Platform Services, Azure SQL, Azure Service Bus, .NET, python, angular, etc.)  
• 50/50 custom developed software vs. “off the shelf” enterprise software solutions & SaaS