Director of IT Operations

Ameris Bank is a purpose-driven company, dedicated to bringing financial peace of mind to communities, one person at a time. Whether a customer wants to grow their business, buy a home, or feel confident in their retirement plan, they have a partner in Ameris Bank. We serve customers in our locations across the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and nationwide through our extensive digital offerings and mobile app.

Delivering financial peace of mind starts with a team that values integrity and rewards ingenuity. At Ameris, you'll find teammates who are inclusive, collaborative problem-solvers who go the extra mile to support one another and to meet every customer's needs. When teammates are empowered and bring their diverse perspectives to the table, we create the best possible outcomes for our customers. At Ameris, we know that a growth mindset is key for high performance and fosters an environment that prioritizes continuous improvement. Teammates have access to Employee Resource Groups that serve as advocates and purpose and how you can bring it to life as an Ameris Bank teammate.

The Director of IT Operations is a senior leadership role responsible for overseeing the IT infrastructure and operations of the organization. This position ensures the efficient and secure operation of the company's IT systems, supports business objectives, and drives technological innovation. The Director of IT Operations collaborates with other departments to align IT strategies with organizational goals and provides strategic direction for IT initiatives. Performs other projects and duties as assigned.

Essential Functions, Duties, and Responsibilities:

• Define and execute the IT Operations strategy aligned to business objectives, OKRs, and risk appetite.

• Build and lead high-performing ops, platform, and service delivery teams; foster a culture of reliability, automation, and continuous improvement.

• Translate business priorities into operational roadmaps (capacity, resiliency, automation, tooling).

• Own end-to-end service delivery and support across incidents, requests, problems, changes, and releases.

• Establish SLAs/OLAs, SLOs/SLIs, and service catalogs, drive adherence and continuous service improvement.

• Chair CAB and ensure robust change control with strong pre-prod validation and automated guardrails.

• Lead major incident management (MIM), communications, and post-incident reviews with blameless RCAs.

• Oversee hybrid infrastructure (datacenter, network, endpoints) and multi-cloud (Azure/AWS) operations.

• Drive standardization and policy through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) (Terraform, CloudFormation or relative tools).

• Ensure capacity planning, performance tuning, patching strategies, and lifecycle management.

• Govern configuration management baselines (Ansible, Chef, Puppet) and golden images.

• Implement SRE practices: error budgets, SLOs, toil reduction, and automated remediation.

• Build unified observability across logs, metrics, traces.

• Establish proactive alerting (noise reduction, correlation, AIOps) and meaningful runbooks with automated runbook execution.

• Automate provisioning, configuration, compliance checks, and patching (Terraform, Ansible, PowerShell DSC).

• Script and orchestrate workflows in PowerShell, Python, and Bash; promote reusable modules and internal tooling.

• Own CI/CD enablement for ops (GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab CI) including policy checks, security scans, and automated rollbacks.

• Use RPA/workflow tools (Jira) for ticket triage, account provisioning, and recurring ops tasks.

• Adopt AIOps for anomaly detection, event correlation, and predictive incident prevention.

• Partner with engineering to provide paved roads: standardized CI/CD pipelines, artifact repositories, container registries, and internal developer platforms (IDP).

• Manage secrets and key management (Vault, AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault); enforce least privilege and rotation.

• Embed security-by-design into operations; ensure vulnerability management, patch SLAs, endpoint hardening (CIS/NIST).

• Maintain control evidence and audit readiness (as applicable).

• Implement zero trust principles (identity-first, segmentation, continuous verification) and strong identity governance.

• Lead operational risk assessments, drive remediation plans, and track residual risk.

• Own continuity planning, disaster recovery strategy, and runbooks; execute regular failover tests.

• Design for high availability and resilience (multi-region, backup and restore, RPO/RTO adherence).

• Manage budgets, forecasts, and unit economics (cost per service/app/user), with show-back/charge-back where needed.

• Drive cloud cost optimization (rightsizing, reservations, autoscaling, FinOps practices).

• Negotiate and manage vendor SLAs, MSAs, and performance; conduct periodic reviews and QBRs.

• Define standards, guardrails, and reference architectures; enforce via automation and pipeline gates.

• Maintain accurate CMDB/asset inventory with automated discovery and reconciliation.

• Ensure high-quality documentation (runbooks, service definitions, diagrams) and knowledge management.

• Serve as the operational point of contact for business units; communicate status, risks, and outcomes clearly.

• Provide executive reporting on availability, performance, incidents, risk posture, and cost.

• Drive adoption of self-service capabilities and clear support models.

• Recruit, mentor, and develop talent across operation engineering.

• Build a culture of ownership, transparency, and learning (game days, chaos engineering, postmortem practice).

• Service availability/uptime; SLO attainment; error budgets consumed.

• Handle MTTA/MTTR, incident volume/trends, change success rate, % automated remediations.

• Compliance posture: patch compliance, vulnerability SLAs, control evidence coverage.

• Cost metrics: cloud spend vs. budget, efficiency (cost per workload/user), waste reduction.

Required Knowledge, Skills and Competencies:

• Deep knowledge of enterprise IT operations, service management, and support models in complex, multilocation environments.

• Strong understanding of ITIL v4 practices, including incident, problem, change, asset, configuration, and service level management.

• Expert knowledge of hybrid infrastructure architecture, including onprem data centers, networking, storage, and public cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP).

• Advanced understanding of cloud-native and platform operations, including containers, Kubernetes, and microservices architectures.

• Working knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), configuration management, and immutable infrastructure concepts.

• Solid understanding of cybersecurity principles as they relate to operations, including vulnerability management, patching, identity, access control, and zero trust models.

• Knowledge of observability and monitoring practices, including metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and AIOps capabilities.

• Familiarity with compliance and regulatory frameworks (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, PCI) and audit readiness requirements.

• Financial and operational knowledge related to IT budgeting, forecasting, vendor management, and cloud cost optimization (FinOps).

• Vulnerability Scanning, Management (Qualys) and Enterprise Patching (Tanium).

• Strong diagnostic and troubleshooting skills across infrastructure, network, cloud, and application layers.

• Demonstrated ability to lead enterprise IT operations teams, including managers, engineers, and SREs.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

• Strong PC and Microsoft Office Suite product proficiency.

• Ability to persuade an audience with strong presentation skills.

Industry and Work Experience:

• 7-10 years in a leadership role with proven experience in IT operations management required.

• 7+ years of experience with budgeting, financial management, and vendor negotiations required.

Academic:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Information Systems, or a related field required.

• Industry standard certifications such as ITIL, VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, etc. preferred.

Benefits Available to Employees:

Ameris Bank provides a comprehensive employee benefit package to all eligible employees.

• Medical, Dental and Vision Insurance

• Ameris Bank absorbs a major portion of the cost of healthcare. You become eligible for coverage on the first of the month following 30 days of employment

• Life Insurance provided at no additional cost to employees

• Accidental Death & Dismemberment Coverage

• Long-Term Disability Coverage

• Paid Sick and Vacation Leave

• 11 Holidays

• Volunteer/Service Day

• Employee Stock Purchase Plan

• 401(k) Retirement Plan

• Ameris Bank matches 50% of your first 8% of contributions to the plan

• Flexible Spending Accounts

• Health Savings Account

• Health Reimbursement Arrangement

• Supplemental Life & Other Insurance Plans

• Identity Theft Protection

• Pet Insurance

• Legal Insurance

• Employee Assistance Program

• Employee Advocacy Program

• Tickets at Work (Entertainment discounts for Ameris Bank Employees)

• AT&T Employee Discount

• Wellness Discounts for Medical Premiums and Other Rewards

• Employee Referral Incentive

• Education Assistance

• Employee Resource Groups

Banking Advantages for Employees:

In addition to a wide array of benefits, Ameris Bank employees are also eligible for special bank services.

• Free Interest Checking

• Free Safe Deposit Box

• Free Money Orders, Travelers' Checks and Cashier Checks

• Discount on Mortgage Origination Fee

• Free Online Banking and Free Unlimited Online Bill Payment

• Employee Banking Perks

Disclaimer:

The above job description is meant to describe the general nature and level of work being performed; it is not intended to be construed as an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties, and skills required for the position.

All job requirements are subject to possible modification to reasonably accommodate individuals with disabilities. Some requirements may exclude individuals who pose a direct threat or significant risk to the health and safety of themselves or other employees.

Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities

This employer is required to notify all applicantss of their rights pursuant to federal employment laws. For further information, please review the Know Your Rights notice from the Department of Labor.