Network Department Lead

Be Here. Be Great. Working for a leader in the insurance industry means opportunity for you. Great American Insurance Group’s member companies are subsidiaries of American Financial Group, a Fortune 500 company. We combine a "small company" culture where your ideas will be heard with "big company" expertise to help you succeed. With over 30 specialty property and casualty operations and a variety of financial services, there are always opportunities here to learn and grow.

The Network Department Lead role has overall end-to-end ownership for the Great American data and voice networks and the team that delivers the service.  The Network & Voice team’s goal is to provide a secure and always-on network and a high quality voice service.  We accomplish this through service excellence based on ITIL guidelines, a strong customer relationship and a focus on technology leadership across all aspects of the service.  The team is continually pushing new technologies, supporting remote and centralized network infrastructure and collaborating with business customers to enhance service levels. This position will be the face of the network team to the business and IT leadership – driving the strategy and results to deliver a top-level service.  This role will be required to work across IT service teams, provide daily leadership to the technical teams and work together with third parties to resolve issues.

• Provide leadership and direction for the Network & Voice department
• Lead a team of engineers, architects, support, and operations personnel in support of an enterprise network and voice environment. This demands a 24x7x365 focus.
• Provide day-to-day management of employees, escalation for operational activities and key project liaison for network and voice projects across the company.
• Act as service owner for third party partners, defining metrics for measuring performance and holding the third parties accountable to service excellence and continuous service improvement.
• Responsible for the planning, forecasting and implementation of network or voice related projects. Act as the leader in defining project scope, work required and the time commitment from the team. 
• Manage a budget for each area, recommending changes and reporting on variances as required.
• Collaborate with technology and business teams to gather network and voice requirements to deliver high quality, innovative and effective solutions.
• Partner with internal and external technical support teams to proactively and reactively resolve, reduce and\or eliminate issues that cause business disruption.
• Deliver ITIL process leadership inside IT with a focus on excellence in change and incident management. Ability to communicate with senior IT executives on root cause, service enhancements and improvement opportunities.
• Make recommendations to improve performance, administration and life cycle management of network and voice service offerings. Communicate business value of recommendations to senior IT leadership.
• Participate as service escalation with team members to provide 24x7 support of network and voice services. Participate in IT outage calls as needed to support incident resolution.
• Adhere to and educate others on Network and Voice standards and processes. Educate the IT Organization on best practices and trends, acting as a trusting advisor to the business and IT.
• Understand the business priorities, grow strong customer relationships and collaborate with the business to define projects to drive joint value.
• Define architectural standards and service offerings, ensuring adherence to these standards and that the service offerings meet the demand of the business.

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or equivalent educational and/or work experience
• Twelve years working experience in a networking or voice related IT discipline in a mid- to large-sized enterprise.
• Exceptional communications skills; written and verbal– succinct and highly articulate.  Ability to effectively communicate at all levels of the organization
• Strong experience working in cross-functional teams.
• Superior organizational leadership skills.
• Proven ability to identify problems and develop recommendations to address.  Proactively identifies and assesses improvement opportunities (efficiency gains, cost savings, etc.).
• Extensive experience with network, security, and voice technologies including a Cisco based architecture, Aruba wireless, load balancing technology and SDWan
• Extensive experience managing both a LAN and WAN environment across varied geographies.
• Experience with security tools including firewalls, SSL decryption, OpenDNS and VPN solutions.
• Extensive experience designing, deploying and improving a network architecture.
• Ability to diagnose and troubleshoot infrastructure and application problems in a complex environment.  Demonstrated ability to perform root cause analysis.
• Ability to lead and mentor others in ITIL best practices and technology planning.  Familiarity with formal change management processes, ITIL Certification and ITSM experience required.
• Ability to provide level-of-effort estimates and complete deliverables within allotted time.
• Demonstrated desire to learn new technologies and ability to adapt to new operating models and changing business requirements effectively.