Director - Operations Engineering (Flexible Hybrid)

Company Description

At Fannie Mae, futures are made. The inspiring work we do helps make a home a possibility for millions of homeowners and renters. Every day offers compelling opportunities to use tech to tackle housing’s biggest challenges and impact the future of the industry. You’ll be a part of an expert team thriving in an energizing, flexible environment. Here, you will grow your career and help create access to fair, affordable housing finance.

Job Description

In this compelling leadership position, you will drive transformation, strategic enhancements, execution, and expansion of the Correction of Errors framework at Fannie Mae as well as lead enterprise-wide IT operations. This is a strategic and thoughtful leader role that will work closely with internal stakeholders and external service partners to ensure critical services and capabilities remain operational, secure and performant. This Director position reports to the Vice President of Operations Engineering and will be required to directly interact with senior leadership and various critical partners. This role will strive towards operational excellence, drive continuous improvement, and ensure that the organization's IT operations remain resilient. This key leadership position will play a pivotal role in ensuring the stability, efficiency, and strategic growth of our IT Operations. The ideal candidate will possess a strong background in IT operations engineering, observability, and strategic planning, coupled with exceptional leadership and communication skills. This role will lead and maintain a high performing team who will partner closely with stakeholders across the organization to ensure practices, policies and plans are pragmatic, effective and free from bias and discrimination in all its forms.

THE IMPACT YOU WILL MAKE
The Support and Tools - Operations Engineering - Director role will offer you the flexibility to make each day your own, while working alongside people who care so that you can deliver on the following responsibilities:

• Lead strategy and direction and drive excellence in the IT Operations and Corrections of Errors functions.
• Transform, enhance and expand the Correction of Errors framework and apply the learnings across the organization.
• Develop and lead Correction of Errors team to ensure quality, consistency, and oversight by developing and maintaining correct methodologies, standards, and tools.
• Lead the execution of FannieMae’s technology strategy and vision with an emphasis on delivering transformational change while using an agile organizational model to drive IT Operations objectives in alignment with overall Business and IT Strategy.
• Align to management’s vision and goals on IT Operations and build strategy and plans around that; execute upon the same.
• Prioritize the work of this team based on management guidance on strategic and tactical deliverables
• Manage budgets, annual program agendas, and recovery improvement metrics.
• Oversee the health of our production environments through operational leadership of our external and cloud technology platforms
• Implement processes and procedures that increase cloud service reliability and continually improve SLA
• Leverage data analytics to identify trends, patterns, and anomalies in system behavior, providing actionable insights for continuous improvement.
• Implement machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions to enhance predictive analysis and proactive issue resolution.
• Bring in a SRE/DevOps/Observability mindset to the IT operations and Correction of Errors space.
• Stay abreast of industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices in observability, tracing, SRE and IT Operations to drive innovation within IT Operations
• Partner with stakeholders across the enterprise on accountability for measuring KPI’s, activities and performance.
• Investigate opportunities for automation in the IT Operations and Correction of Errors space and utilize the automation team members to deliver on the same.
• Develop and implement an Operational Excellence strategy to accomplish cost leadership by focusing on automating processes and workloads to streamline operations and reduce cost.
• Execute select strategic innovation initiatives as directed by the leadership.
• Ensure that all regulatory and auditing guidelines are followed, and solid business practices are implemented.
• Utilize technical knowledge and skills to effectively translate the unique needs and requirements of the technology organization into project/program objectives, roadmaps, and activities
• Create and foster the use of process standards and templates (e.g., project intake, project charter, project kick-off, requirements creation, user acceptance, status reports, meeting agenda, project schedule and release plan, product backlog, issue/risk logs, retrospectives, user stories, etc.) and facilitate the capture of product and project documentation as needed throughout the project lifecycle.
• Create, structure, and direct analyses as required, supported by hypotheses, collecting data, executing analyses, and synthesizing findings
• Create and conduct regular reviews with IT management, functional management, and executives such that key projects are tracking to defined objectives and key performance indicators and maintain stakeholder alignment
• Proactively manage the risk, issue, and change resolution process, and work with other leaders to take corrective action as needed.
• Develop and manage standardized and highly efficient technology services; ensure reliability and scalability of infrastructure in a dynamic environment.
• Establish and maintain key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of IT operations and observability efforts.
• Monitor environments and recommend additional controls and governance.
• Ensure all technology practices adhere to IT, Information Security, compliance, and regulatory standards and controls.
• Establish collaborative working relationships with outside vendors, which will help to enhance service delivery capabilities
• Perform all departmental administrative activities, including staff meeting attendance, monthly status reporting, budgeting, strategic planning, staff performance management, expense processing, documentation and other activities, as assigned, in a timely fashion.
• Partner with other Architecture, Engineering and Information security teams to monitor emerging cloud and infrastructure technologies risks.
• Develop and manage a world-class team
• Provide strong leadership with a focus on attracting, motivating, and developing best-in-class talent. Mentor and coach teams to develop future leaders in alignment with company objectives.
• Balance both leading a team and engaging directly with the work needed to accomplish objectives.
• Assist direct reports with ongoing prioritization and resource allocation to ensure that the crucial business initiatives are delivered.
• Utilize leadership skills, problem solving and decision-making skills to facilitate and encourage participation of team members to meet objectives in congruence with approved standards and guidelines.
• Be a leader that continually raises the bar for others.
• Champion and advocate for the value of diversity, equity and inclusion
• Use a lens of equity in establishing and promoting policies and procedures.

Qualifications

THE EXPERIENCE YOU BRING TO THE TEAM

Qualification and Skills –

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field; or an equivalent combination of education and work experience.
• 8+ years of management experience in Information technology with expertise in any two from this list - IT operations, Cloud technologies, Command Center, observability, infrastructure, security and technical architecture; 5+ years of experience with managing large teams.
• 5-7 years of experience with AWS and traditional infrastructure (compute, storage, networking, database, middleware) and ITSM operations frameworks (ITIL, MOF, COBIT, etc).
• Excellent understanding of at least 8 of the following - AWS EC2, Lambda, Beanstalk, ECS, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, Systems Manager, VPC, CloudFront, ALB, Neptune, RDS, Redshift, Aurora, Glue.
• Proven experience (5 years) managing IT operations.
• Experience with Splunk, Dynatrace, Cloudwatch, Moogsoft or similar tools is preferred.
• 5+ years designing and leading IT PMO processes and tool adoption, technology strategic planning and budgeting, portfolio management using various methodologies preferred.
• Professional AWS cloud certification preferred.
• Proven experience leading 24 x 7 IT/Cloud Operations team across a variety of *aaS architectures and associated operations in a matrixed, cross-functional organization.
• Advanced knowledge and experience defining, implementing, and managing ongoing portfolio management, strategic planning, program management, and IT Governance processes.
• Thorough understanding of ITIL processes related to incident management, problem management, application life cycle management, operational health management.
• In-depth knowledge of IT infrastructure, observability tools, data analytics, and incident management processes.
• Strong understanding of cloud platforms, microservices architecture, and containerization.
• Strong strategic thinking and planning skills with the ability to align IT initiatives with business objectives.
• Excellent writing, communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to engage with stakeholders at all levels.
• Proven ability to communicate effectively with C level executives.
• Demonstrated experience in team management and development.
• Strong business acumen and relationship management skills.
• Ability to transform business processes using BPA, RPA, or other technology-enabled automation.
• Ability to anticipate user requirements and identify and resolve complex problems.
• Demonstrated experience in effectively managing multiple projects of various size from small to enterprise utilizing various methods (waterfall, agile) in a cross-functional environment.
• Ability to attract, foster and retain exceptional talent necessary and build effective operation teams
• Demonstrable skills and ability to develop practical solutions to address complex technological and organizational challenges.
• Skilled in defining meaningful and achievable Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• Cultivate and maintain positive, collaborative and productive working relationships across all internal and external stakeholders
• Capacity and agility to digest new information quickly, and apply existing knowledge to make connections across different areas and identify key areas to explore.
• Excellent skills in analyzing and depicting patterns and trends from data collected from multiple sources.
• Full knowledge and experience with current stack of cloud technologies (especially AWS), latest security and regulatory requirements.
• Excellent skills in monitoring, tracing, profiling, and diagnosing distributed software services, system internals, databases, and transactions with inherit ability to quickly grasp and logically resolve complex technical issues.
• The group of skills related to Business Resilience including managing crisis events, assessing business impact, and planning and managing business continuity.
• The group of skills related to Risk Assessment and Management including evaluating and designing controls, conducting impact assessments, identifying control gaps, remediating risk, etc.
• Collective capabilities for leadership, including leading teams, giving feedback, facilitating meetings, and coaching and mentoring.
• Experience in the process of analyzing data to identify trends or relationships to inform conclusions about the data.
• Experience identifying measures, or indicators of system performance, and the actions needed to improve or correct performance to achieve desired outcomes.
• Working with people with different functional expertise respectfully and cooperatively to work towards a common goal
• The group of skills related to Governance and Compliance including creating policies, evaluating compliance, conducting internal investigations, developing data governance, etc.
• Experience identifying and selecting strategic options, and identifying resources to meet the defined objectives
• Adept at managing project plans, resources, and people to ensure successful project completion
• The group of skills related to Influencing including negotiating, persuading others, facilitating meetings, and resolving conflict.
• Organized and detail-oriented with the ability to meet deadlines in a fast-paced environment
• Experience in the Fintech or Financial Services vertical highly desired
• Results oriented with a high degree of resilience and perseverance.
• Proactive, able to anticipate obstacles and develop plans that deliver results.
• Proven ability to analyze, integrate, recommend, contribute to the development of conceptual plans for, and lead implement of, strategic, process, and team improvement and change initiatives cross-functionally.
• Demonstrated situational leadership and creative problem solving within department and teams.
• Strategic thinking, executive presence, sound judgment, and ability to influence executives
• Team ethic, high standards, and the drive to do whatever it takes
• Attitude of transparency: desire and ability to bring disclosure and transparency across teams and grow trust between the various different stakeholders
• Experience using JIRA
• Experience using Microsoft Project
• Skilled in ServiceNow

Additional Information

The future is what you make it to be. Discover compelling opportunities at careers.fanniemae.com.

Fannie Mae is an Equal Opportunity Employer, which means we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, personal appearance, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. For individuals with disabilities who would like to request an accommodation in the application process, email us at [email protected].

Fannie Mae is a flexible hybrid company. We embrace flexibility for our employees to work where they choose, while also providing office space for in-person work if desired. At times, business need may call for on-site collaboration, which means proximity within a reasonable commute to your designated office location is preferred unless job is noted as open to remote.

The hiring range for this role is set forth on each of our job postings located on Fannie Mae's Career Site. Final salaries will generally vary within that range based on factors that include but are not limited to, skill set, depth of experience, certifications, and other relevant qualifications. This position is eligible to participate in a Fannie Mae incentive program (subject to the terms of the program). As part of our comprehensive benefits package, Fannie Mae offers a broad range of Health, Life, Voluntary Lifestyle, and other benefits and perks that enhance an employee’s physical, mental, emotional, and financial well-being. See more here.