Job Description
The Senior Director of Data Center Facilities & Critical Infrastructure is accountable for the strategy, resilience, and operational excellence of the company’s global data center and colocation facilities. This role owns the end‑to‑end facilities lifecycle across enterprise‑owned and third‑party sites, ensuring uninterrupted availability of mission‑critical services while balancing risk, cost, capacity, and long‑term scalability.
This position operates as the senior authority for physical infrastructure, serving as the executive escalation point for facilities‑related risk, incidents, and strategic decisions. The role partners closely with technology, security, risk, finance, procurement, and executive leadership to ensure data center facilities enable business growth, regulatory compliance, and operational resilience.
Strategic Leadership & Accountability
- Define and execute the enterprise strategy for data center facilities, colocation services, and critical infrastructure operations.
- Own availability, resilience, safety, and compliance outcomes for all facilities supporting production workloads.
- Serve as the executive sponsor for major facilities initiatives including expansions, consolidations, migrations, and new site onboarding.
- Provide clear, data‑driven insights to executive leadership on infrastructure risk, capacity constraints, investment needs, and cost optimization opportunities.
Facilities Operations & Resilience
- Establish and govern standards for electrical, mechanical, HVAC, fire suppression, and physical infrastructure systems across all sites.
- Ensure disciplined execution of preventative, predictive, and corrective maintenance programs aligned to business criticality.
- Act as the final escalation point for significant facilities incidents, directing root cause analysis and enterprise‑level remediation.
- Drive continuous improvement in uptime, reliability, operational maturity, and safety culture.
Colocation & Vendor Governance
- Own the global colocation and facilities vendor strategy, including provider selection, contract governance, and performance management.
- Lead executive‑level relationships with colocation providers and critical service vendors.
- Ensure vendors consistently meet contractual SLAs, regulatory obligations, and operational expectations.
- Partner with procurement and legal teams to negotiate contracts, manage renewals, and optimize cost and commercial terms.
Risk, Compliance & Change Management
- Establish enterprise‑wide governance for facilities change management, including risk assessments, method of procedure (MOP) standards, and execution oversight.
- Ensure audit readiness and compliance with internal controls, regulatory requirements, and safety standards.
- Proactively identify, quantify, and mitigate facilities‑related risk across the global footprint.
- Support regulatory, internal audit, and executive risk committees with clear and defensible reporting.
Capacity, Investment & Lifecycle Planning
- Own long‑range capacity planning for power, cooling, and space across owned and colocation environments.
- Align facilities strategy with infrastructure, network, and platform roadmaps.
- Develop multi‑year capital and operating plans, balancing growth, resilience, and cost efficiency.
- Make investment recommendations grounded in risk reduction, availability improvement, and business enablement.
People Leadership & Organizational Development
- Lead, develop, and scale a global facilities organization, including managers, engineers, and managed service providers.
- Set clear expectations, accountability, and performance standards across the organization.
- Build a strong bench of facilities leadership through succession planning and talent development.
- Foster a culture of operational rigor, safety, ownership, and continuous improvement.
Qualifications & Experience
Required
- Extensive experience leading mission‑critical data center facilities or comparable critical infrastructure at enterprise scale.
- Proven executive ownership of availability, resilience, and risk in highly regulated or high‑availability environments.
- Deep understanding of electrical and mechanical systems supporting large‑scale data centers and colocation facilities.
- Demonstrated success managing global vendors, large contracts, and executive‑level escalations.
- Strong financial and operational acumen, including capital planning and cost management.
Preferred
- Experience operating across geographically distributed, hybrid (enterprise‑owned + colocation) environments.
- Background supporting M&A, TSA transitions, or large‑scale infrastructure transformations.
- Experience partnering with audit, risk, compliance, and regulatory bodies.
- Track record of modernizing facilities operations through automation, analytics, and standardized operating models.
What Success Looks Like
- Facilities risk is proactively identified, clearly communicated, and systematically reduced.
- Data center and colocation environments consistently meet or exceed availability and resilience expectations.
- Capacity and investment decisions are forward‑looking, data‑driven, and aligned to business strategy.
- Vendors operate as accountable partners, not unmanaged dependencies.
- Executive leadership has confidence in the safety, scalability, and durability of the physical infrastructure platform.
Privacy Statement
FIS is committed to protecting the privacy and security of all personal information that we process in order to provide services to our clients. For specific information on how FIS protects personal information online, please see the Online Privacy Notice.
EEOC Statement
FIS is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, genetic information, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other protected characteristics. The EEO is the Law poster is available here supplement document available here
For positions located in the US, the following conditions apply. If you are made a conditional offer of employment, you will be required to undergo a drug test. ADA Disclaimer: In developing this job description care was taken to include all competencies needed to successfully perform in this position. However, for Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) purposes, the essential functions of the job may or may not have been described for purposes of ADA reasonable accommodation. All reasonable accommodation requests will be reviewed and evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Sourcing Model
Recruitment at FIS works primarily on a direct sourcing model; a relatively small portion of our hiring is through recruitment agencies. FIS does not accept resumes from recruitment agencies which are not on the preferred supplier list and is not responsible for any related fees for resumes submitted to job postings, our employees, or any other part of our company.
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