Job Description & Details
This is a heavy-duty interim leadership gig stepping into the University of South Carolina to stabilize an IT department dealing with serious operational and cultural friction. You won't just be pushing paper; you'll be fixing broken workflows, managing research infrastructure, and whipping the team into shape before they hire a permanent director.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Your day-to-day will involve walking into a department that needs immediate triage, taking stock of massive research technology architectures, and rebuilding trust across the board. You'll spend your time untangling operational bottlenecks, enforcing accountability among staff, aligning customer support tickets with actual service standards, and making tough calls on resource allocation. Expect to deal with plenty of human resistance to change, requiring you to balance empathetic mentorship with absolute clarity on performance metrics.
The Core Tech Stack
You need to speak fluent enterprise infrastructure, specifically touching high-performance computing, Slurm job schedulers, Infiniband networking, and high-speed storage setups. They also want to see familiarity with cloud ecosystems like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, plus a solid grasp of AI infrastructure. On top of the hardware and cloud side, you must know ITIL service frameworks inside and out to fix their operational delivery.
Interview Expectations
The hiring panel is going to test your crisis management and leadership stamina. They'll likely ask you to walk through a specific time you stepped into a toxic or disorganized technical team and turned operations around within six months. They want to hear how you handle underperforming staff and make unpopular operational decisions without completely crushing team morale, so make sure your examples are raw, honest, and results-driven.
Application Advice
Your resume needs to heavily emphasize turnaround stories rather than just project delivery. Mirror the exact terminology from the job description by highlighting terms like organizational transformation, OCM, ITIL maturity, and high-performance computing. Since this role requires local residency in SC, NC, or GA, make your location status blindingly clear at the top of your resume so you don't get auto-filtered out by the ATS.