Director of IT Technology

New York

Job Description Job Description Key Responsibilities:

Technology Strategy:

Develop and execute a comprehensive technology strategy aligned with the company's goals and objectives. Continuously evaluate emerging technologies and industry trends to drive innovation and maintain a competitive edge.

It will be important to keep the infrastructure current and prevent obsolescence to position the company for a stable and reliable future which can accommodate a changing application.

Team Leadership:

Provide strong leadership to the technology team, including software engineers, system administrators, and other technical professionals. Foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and excellence, empowering team members to achieve their full potential. Development of a successor will be important to ensure continuity.

Software Development:

Provide oversight particularly to the President of DRF and the CIO of Affinity on the design, development, and deployment of software solutions, where knowledge exists

Infrastructure Management:

Manage and optimize IT infrastructure, including servers, networks, and cloud services. Implement robust security measures and disaster recovery plans to safeguard company data and systems. Find the sweet spot between cost effective and reliable. Minimize surprised by ensuring that certificates, software renewals, are all current.

Data Management:

Ensure that data flows reliably between DRF data providers and DRF to help ensure products are reliable and timely.

Vendor Management:

Evaluate third-party vendors, contractors, and technology partners to ensure alignment with business requirements and standards. Negotiate contracts, service agreements, and licensing terms to maximize value and mitigate risks. Stay informed on vendor set to ensure the DRF is prepared for product upgrades and cancellations. Also stay informed as to the financial viability of vendors and make provisions for change should it be necessary after a crisis ensues

Policy:

Ensure that policies and procedures and updated and adhered to. These would include keeping the organization functioning at a CMM level 2, at a minimum, adhering to Affinity IT gaming standards.

Compliance and Security:

Ensure compliance with relevant regulations, standards, and industry best practices related to data privacy, security, and confidentiality. Implement robust security protocols and procedures to protect sensitive information and mitigate cybersecurity threats. Ensure PCI compliance.

Budgeting and Resource Allocation: Develop and manage the technology budget, allocating resources effectively to support strategic initiatives and operational needs. Monitor expenses and identify opportunities for cost optimization and efficiency improvement.

Stakeholder Engagement:

Collaborate closely with internal stakeholders, including executive leadership, product management, marketing, and sales teams, to understand business requirements and priorities. Communicate effectively with stakeholders to provide updates, solicit feedback, and align technology initiatives with organizational objectives. The Director of Technology will have regular meetings with DRF Leadership and with the CIO of Affinity Interactive. This Leader will also work closely with the Haptiq software development team.

Qualifications:

· Must have 7 to 10 years experience working in a highly dynamic SLA driven environment supporting externally facing realtime e-comm enterprise architecture, coordinating with development teams, supporting high traffic events and provide general operational support.

· Must have 7 to 10 years of experience managing, capacity planning, maintaining and supporting physical and virtualized externally facing UNIX/Linux/Windows environments. Configuring/managing load balancing solutions (Citrix Netscalers, HaProxy), participate in middleware and OS patching, SSL certificate upgrades, provisioning scripting, and task scheduling. Able to manage data center hardware, rack/stack, cabling, parts replacement.

· Management of vendors for support agreements and managed services for infrastructure including procurement, license management and SLA monitoring.

· Proven experience working in physical data centers participating in hardware build outs, closely engaging/working with 3rd party vendors and integrations.

· Knowledgeable of virtualization platforms including VMware ESXi, Nutanix and VDI.

· Strong familiarity with hyper converged systems including Nutanix, Cohesity, and VMWare.

· Competency working with DBAs in supporting database infrastructures including Sybase, MySQL, MariaDB, MS-SQL, Mongo-DB and Mongo.

· Experience with Cohesity and similar data backup platform management solutions across VMware, NAS, databases platforms, 0365 and Active Directory.

· Knowledge and proven experience working and supporting High capacity storage devices, SAN switches, and SAN replication solutions.

· Infrastructure configuration and automation tools including Chef, Ansible, Terraform, and Jenkins

· Working experience with AWS cloud infrastructure

· Strong knowledge of networking concepts and network security including DNS management, firewalls/security, VPN, IP tunnels, NAT, VLANS, and routing

· Strong operational experience instrumenting monitoring/alerting tools, building and defining operational SLAs, and responding/managing operational incidents.

· Experience and strong understanding of Disaster Recovery concepts and mechanisms.

· Strong familiarity with AWS and public clouds

· Knowledge of diverse application stack and technologies including web and app servers, JDK, various caching solutions, Edge services and CDN, Cron, NetApp, and other.

· Strong experience with security standards (PCI-DSS, NIST, ISO 27001)

· Experience participating and leading security initiatives, integrations across internal and external systems.

· Experience with Edge Level solutions including CDNs, WAFs, and public DNS providers.

· Working experience utilizing and integration of APM solutions including Elastic, Graylog, and other.

· Must have excellent communication skills.

· Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and senior stakeholders. Demonstrated leadership abilities, including strategic thinking, decision-making, and team management.

· Knowledge of the horse racing industry or sports betting sector is a plus but not required.

Location:

The position is based at our headquarters in New York, with occasional travel as needed.

Benefits:

Competitive salary, comprehensive benefits package, opportunities for professional development and advancement. At The Daily Racing Form, we are committed to fostering a workplace culture where all employees feel valued, respected, and empowered to contribute their unique perspectives and talents.