Senior Manager of Research Storage & Data Infrastructure

About the Role St. Jude Children's Research Hospital is seeking an experienced and strategic leader to manage and advance the institution's research storage ecosystem. As the Senior Manager of Research Storage & Data Infrastructure within Research Information Services (RIS), you will lead the team responsible for delivering scalable, secure, and high-performance data infrastructure that supports world-class biomedical research, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing. This role provides strategic and operational leadership for St. Jude's scientific computing storage environment, encompassing active research storage, archival and object storage, cloud-integrated platforms, secure research environments, data protection services, and disaster recovery capabilities. You will define technology strategy, guide platform evolution, oversee major investments, and ensure operational excellence across systems that store and protect some of the institution's most valuable research assets. Working closely with Information Services teams, research programs, administrative leadership, and external collaborators, you will serve as a trusted advisor on storage architecture, research computing operations, service quality, capacity planning, and technology roadmaps. The position also plays a critical role in aligning infrastructure capabilities with evolving scientific and institutional priorities. A key responsibility of this role is managing strategic vendor partnerships, including operational governance, architecture reviews, service delivery management, procurement support, technology evaluations, and performance accountability. As the primary institutional representative for research storage platforms, you will ensure effective coordination among St. Jude stakeholders, technology partners, and the broader research community. The successful candidate will oversee infrastructure supporting AI training and inference, high-performance computing, genomics, imaging, scientific instrumentation, and other data-intensive research workloads while maintaining robust business continuity, backup, and disaster recovery capabilities for mission-critical research services. What You Will Do: Storage Strategy & Architecture: Develop and manage the roadmap for St. Jude’s centralized research storage platforms, including high-performance file systems, object storage, archival storage, cloud-integrated storage, and secure research environments. Lead architecture planning for future growth associated with AI, machine learning, scientific computing, research instrumentation, and emerging research technologies. Evaluate new technologies and vendor solutions to improve performance, resilience, scalability, user experience, and cost efficiency. Support institutional planning for significant increases in research data volume and complexity. Operations & Service Delivery: Ensure reliable operation of research storage services supporting HPC, AI, regulated research environments, institutional applications, and data-intensive science. Establish and monitor service-level objectives, operational metrics, capacity forecasts, and performance benchmarks. Develop reporting and dashboards to support leadership decision-making, budgeting, procurement, and lifecycle planning. Lead incident management, root-cause analysis, change management, and continuous service improvement activities. Document procedures and operational knowledge to support transparency and transfer across the institution and to new staff as well as updating and supporting centralized asset management and information security. Vendor & Partner Management: Serve as the primary relationship manager for storage vendors. Lead governance meetings, technical reviews, architecture planning sessions, and service performance assessments. Review equipment proposals, quotations, statements of work, and technology recommendations. Define RACI models, escalation processes, and operational responsibilities across internal teams and service providers. Research Data Management & Governance: Partner with researchers, data stewards, and RIS leadership to align storage services with institutional data management objectives. Support storage governance, archival processes, retention strategies, and lifecycle management activities. Collaborate with Information Security and compliance partners to ensure appropriate controls for sensitive and regulated research data. Promote data stewardship, efficient resource utilization, and sustainable storage growth. Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity & Cyber Resilience: Develop and maintain storage-related disaster recovery and business continuity strategies supporting institutional recovery objectives. Ensure storage platforms are designed with resiliency, recoverability, backup, replication, immutable recovery, and cyber resilience capabilities. Partner with Information Security, Technology Services, and RIS leadership to define recovery objectives, recovery procedures, and operational response plans. Lead disaster recovery testing, recovery validation exercises, and documentation reviews. Maintain architecture and operational documentation supporting audit readiness, business continuity, and disaster recovery requirements. Identify and mitigate operational risks associated with storage infrastructure, vendor dependencies, capacity constraints, and emerging technologies. Leadership & Team Development: Lead, mentor, and develop a team of storage engineers, infrastructure specialists, and trusted consultants. Foster a culture of accountability, operational excellence, innovation, collaboration, and customer service. Support hiring, performance management, career development, succession planning, and workforce growth. Build strong partnerships across RIS, Technology Services, Information Security, Shared Resources, and the research community. Qualifications: Required Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in business administration, computer science, data science, information science or related field. Required Experience: 8+ years of progressive IT experience with experience managing small/mid-size teams, preferably enterprise-scale storage infrastructure, research computing environments, or large-scale data platforms. Experience leading complex projects/delivery in terms of resources, vendors and budgets. Experience managing teams in a supervisory/ leadership capacity, preferably 3+ years of experience leading technical teams or infrastructure operations. Proven performance in earlier role/comparable role. Highly Preferred Experience: Experience managing storage technologies across on-premises, colocation, and/or cloud environments. Experience working with storage vendors, managed service providers, or strategic technology partners. Strong understanding of storage architecture, capacity planning, backup, replication, data protection, disaster recovery, business continuity, on-premises and cloud data storage, and performance optimization. Demonstrated success leading operational service delivery and infrastructure lifecycle management. Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills. Preferred Experience: Experience supporting high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), scientific computing, or large-scale research environments. Experience administering or supporting IBM Storage Scale (GPFS), Lustre, or comparable parallel file systems. Familiarity with object storage platforms and S3-compatible architectures. Experience designing and operating multi-tiered storage ecosystems spanning flash, disk, archive, cloud, and replication tiers. Knowledge of leveraging local NVMe resources, burst buffers, caching layers, or node-local storage to accelerate AI and HPC workloads. Experience supporting genomics, imaging, microscopy, or other high-throughput research data pipelines. Experience with storage benchmarking, observabi