The Lead IT Engineer provides strategic oversight and technical leadership across all facets of the organization’s infrastructure—servers, cloud, networking, storage, telephony, and endpoint management—ensuring security and reliability. They will work with both non-validated and validated systems to ensure compliance under GMP/21 CFR Part 11. Acting as the highest-level escalation point, you will architect solutions, define roadmaps, and guide large-scale projects that shape the future of IT operations. This includes working with operational technology, lab systems, and strategic partners to align IT best practices with evolving business requirements. You will lead continuous service improvements, oversee release and change management in ServiceNow, and support a culture of innovation and knowledge-sharing. Success in this role includes exceptional technical leadership, strategic thinking, and stakeholder management to deliver robust, secure, and scalable infrastructure solutions for the enterprise.
Further, this is a pre-management role, with the expectation that the incumbent develop and refine the skills needed to providing leadership, oversight and management of all Plant information technology solutions and teams.
The responsibilities:
- Act as the final/highest-level escalation point and the point of contact for external vendor escalations for infrastructure support tickets and complex issues, including network outages, major incidents, or system failures. Use ServiceNow to manage incidents, service requests, and changes adhering to established SLAs and ITSM processes and providing professional and quality service.
- Participate and run the Major Incident Management process and coordinate efforts for resolution.
- Collaborate on long-term architecture and technology roadmaps for on-prem and cloud environments (Azure, AWS).
- Conduct capacity planning and performance analyses to inform budgeting, resource allocation, and future investments.
- Evaluate emerging technologies (e.g., IoT, SD-WAN, containerization) for potential implementation in manufacturing and OT contexts.
- Own incident, request, enhancement, knowledge, CMDB, release and change management processes for infrastructure, ensuring compliance with GMP/21 CFR Part 11 and ITIL best practices.
- Oversee patching strategies for both validated and non-validated systems, collaborating with QA/Compliance teams to manage regulated environments.
- Partner with Operational Technology, lab systems, and IoT teams to align manufacturing processes with IT best practices.
- Work with IT Business Analysts, Senior Engineers, and offshore support teams to deliver integrated solutions for critical applications.
- Maintain and improve collaboration and communication systems. Including cisco telephony for IP and non-IP phone systems, conference rooms, Microsoft teams, multi-function printers and secure print.
- Liaise with vendors, consultants, and third-party providers for specialized projects or advanced troubleshooting.
- Implement robust firewall and network segmentation strategies to protect manufacturing networks and lab environments.
- Guide the security posture (SSO, MFA, Zero Trust) in partnership with Information Security teams.
- Continuously evaluate and mitigate infrastructure risks, including vulnerability management and BCP/DR testing.
- Ensure accurate CMDB maintenance and foster knowledge management practices that enhance shift-left efficiency.
- Create advanced dashboards and reports for senior management, highlighting KPIs, trends, and improvement areas.
- Mentor Senior IT Engineers and collaborate with offshore partners to build a high-performing, cross-functional team.
- Encourage continuous learning and skill development, cultivating a culture of innovation and best-practice adoption.
- Ensure all Infrastructure and Operations efforts are completed on-time and with quality which includes managing and enhancing monitoring and alerting, backup and recovery, patching, and performing analysis to build reliable, resilient, secure, and scalable systems.
- Lead by example with documentation, compliance, and communication standards, reinforcing knowledge-sharing across the organization.
- Oversee major initiatives to improve reliability, performance, and scalability across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures.
- Identify improvement opportunities in processes, automations (e.g., Infrastructure as Code), and advanced monitoring solutions.
- Drive collaboration between corporate IT, OT, lab systems, and offshore partners for seamless end-to-end service delivery.
Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, IT, or related field; or equivalent experience
- 5–8+ years of experience in progressive IT infrastructure roles, with 2+ years in a leadership or senior engineering capacity.
- Extensive experience in regulated (GMP/21 CFR Part 11) environments, overseeing validated and non-validated systems preferred.
