Director - Core Network Services in Bad Homburg, Germany

• Lead network engineering staff primarily located in EMEA region; provide structured organizational leadership to the team.
• Guide and develop the technical staff, leading them from traditional data center networking to cloud networking in terms of skills, processes, and mind-set.
• Navigate a matrixed, large environment to deliver projects within a fast-paced environment on time and within budget; remove technical and non-technical roadblocks for the team.
• Oversee the management of project budgets either by self or by the Project Managers.
• Work with peer groups and consultants to build a landing zone architecture; and to assess/remediate prior non-standard deployments that may contain security or operational vulnerabilities.
• Work and support Global Real Estate stakeholders steering new buildings engineering from design to implementation of networks. The role shall facilitate the interactions with the wider network Team.
• Serve as a strategic interface to peer groups and business units who generate project work for the network function. Communicate strategy plans and project plans to the business unit points of contact; bring business requirements back to the core network team.
• Provide decision-making analysis and recommendations for the selection of solutions, vendors, proposals, cost scenarios, etc.
• Provide or at least support to organize occasional tier-3 support for escalated incidents & problems on best effort basis.
• Work with application owners and systems engineers to anticipate and plan for changes and hyper care associated with planned migrations.
• Drive the development of technical standards around data center/cloud networks, trust zone architectures, and other core/shared network services.

Required Skills & Experience:

• Demonstrated experience and skills performing the responsibilities above.
• Minimum of 5 years directly managing technical staff in a medium or large enterprise (10,000 or more employees preferred).
• Minimum of 5 years leading large/complex IT projects (network project experience is preferred, but experience will be considered in managing other areas of IT infrastructure).
• High-level technical skills in at least one of the areas within the scope of the role, along with strong broad skills across networking.
• The Manager is expected to understand the basic architecture and design of the client's network, but not necessarily at a detailed engineering level.
• Ability to build, motivate and develop teams.
• Ability to influence a variety of stakeholders and to drive changes of behavior in technical staff (eg to become more disciplined in documentation, requirements gathering and change control; to learn more technical depth; and to learn and accept broader responsibilities, etc.).
• Budget Management experience.
• Project & Portfolio Management skills.
• Candidate must be highly organized, process-oriented, and disciplined in terms of developing and following procedures, producing documentation, and making data-driven decisions.
• Interpersonal and communication skills; ability to collaborate with a wide range of stakeholders in highly matrixed environment.
• Strong sense of ownership, customer service, organization, and follow-through.
• Ability to prioritize work and manage time effectively.
• Ability to work in a highly visible, fast-paced environment with minimal supervision.
• Positive, collaborative, supportive, problem-solving approach to working with others.

Preferred Additional Skills & Experience:

• Previous or current network certifications are preferred such as CCNP/CCIE/CISP.
• Azure certifications are highly desirable.
• Network architecture/design experience or expertise.
• International experience, holding responsibility for multinational staff and/or projects.
• ITIL v4 certification is beneficial.