Job Description & Details
This is a heavy-duty interim leadership role dropped right into the middle of the University of South Carolina's Division of IT. You're walking into a department that needs stabilization, culture rebuilding, and operational restructuring before they bring in a permanent director. If you like turning around chaotic IT orgs and dealing with high-performance computing research tech, this contract gives you full autonomy to make hard decisions.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Your day-to-day won't be writing code or racking servers; it's pure executive turnaround. You will manage departmental operations, supervise managers and staff, set strict performance expectations, and remove roadblocks keeping the team from shipping. You'll audit the current research technology infrastructure—everything from HPC clusters to storage and networking—while establishing standard service desk workflows and governance frameworks. A huge part of your time goes toward fixing employee accountability, boosting morale, and prepping transition documentation so the eventual permanent director inherits a healthy machine.
The Core Tech Stack
While you are leading people, you need to speak the language of modern research cyberinfrastructure. The must-haves are deep familiarity with high-performance computing (HPC), high-speed storage, and advanced networking. Having exposure to Slurm, Infiniband, AI infrastructure platforms across AWS, Azure, or GCP, and ITIL frameworks is heavily preferred because you'll need to audit these environments and align them with institutional goals. Being a certified Carpentries Instructor or having experience training folks on HPC tech is a massive plus for bridging the skills gap in their current team.
Interview Expectations
Expect the hiring panel to test your crisis management and change implementation playbook. They'll likely ask you to describe a time you walked into a toxic or disorganized technical team and how you established operational maturity without causing a mass exodus. They want to see how you balance empathy with hard-nosed accountability. Another common angle will be technical governance: how do you assess an HPC and research infrastructure budget against institutional priorities when everyone is fighting for resources?
Application Advice
To make it past the ATS, your resume needs to front-load keywords like organizational change management (OCM), service delivery optimization, and research cyberinfrastructure. Don't just list technical tools; highlight your actual P&L or budget management experience, staff headcounts you've led, and specific milestones where you successfully transformed higher-end IT operations. Since this role mandates residency in SC, NC, or GA, make your location front and center on the resume immediately.