JOB PURPOSE
Leads the firm's infrastructure, security operations, and technical operations function, ensuring reliable, secure, resilient, and well-managed technology services across two data centers, firm offices, cloud environments, and remote users.
The manager owns operational outcomes through the team. This is a technical management role, not a senior engineering or enterprise architecture position. It requires enough technical depth to judge whether plans are credible, the discipline to judge whether work will be delivered, and the judgment to know when to coach, challenge, intervene, or escalate.
The role directly manages networking, systems administration, security operations, and application/database administration. It owns data center, network, security operations, identity, endpoint, and backup and disaster recovery operations, and oversees the staff who support Microsoft 365, voice and unified communications, Zoom Rooms infrastructure, applications, databases, and legal-industry platforms. For those services the manager is accountable for priorities, service quality, and results, not for performing the work. Audiovisual systems are excluded. Tools named in this description are examples of the current environment and may change.
ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS
People Leadership
- Leads, coaches, and develops technical professionals while establishing clear accountability for service quality, communication, documentation, execution, and results.
- Sets priorities, balances workload, builds primary and secondary coverage, and reduces key-person and vendor dependency through cross-training, documentation, and succession planning.
- Gives team members appropriate autonomy while remaining engaged enough to recognize when coaching, challenge, intervention, or escalation is required.
Operational Excellence
- Owns the reliability, availability, lifecycle, and supportability of services operated by the team, including operations and failover readiness across the firm's two data centers.
- Owns operation of SD-WAN/SASE, campus switching and wireless, and firewalls (currently, for example, Netskope, Cisco, and Juniper), and identity and endpoint management (for example, Active Directory, Entra ID, and Intune).
- Owns operational processes for incident, problem, change, monitoring, vulnerability remediation, lifecycle management, capacity, documentation, backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity readiness.
- Owns operational acceptance of new and materially changed technology. Implementation is not complete until the service is supportable, monitored, documented, recoverable, assigned clear ownership, and transitioned into ongoing operations.
- Promotes standardization, automation, and simplification; maintains a lifecycle roadmap of technical debt, resilience gaps, capacity, and end-of-life risk; and brings budget, renewal, licensing, and contract recommendations to the Head of Information Technology.
Technical Judgment
- Maintains enough technical depth to evaluate designs, challenge assumptions, and assess supportability, resilience, security, and readiness; recognizes when senior engineers, vendors, or external expertise are needed.
- Partners with senior engineers, the Head of Information Technology, and qualified external resources to review significant architecture and design decisions. Final architecture authority and formal risk acceptance remain with the Head of Information Technology.
Delivery & Change
- Ensures significant projects and changes have clear ownership, requirements, dependencies, milestones, communication, testing, implementation and rollback plans, and success criteria.
- Maintains an evidence-based view of project health, challenges status the facts don't support, and escalates material risks with impact, options, and recommendations.
- Works with project managers when assigned while remaining accountable for the technical team's deliverables, readiness, communication, and transition into operations.
Incident & Risk Management
- Leads the management response to significant incidents.
- Ensures clear ownership, structured troubleshooting, effective communication, appropriate escalation, root-cause analysis, corrective action, and follow-through.
- Owns security operations, including endpoint detection and response and vulnerability management (for example, SentinelOne and Rapid7): agent coverage, policy health, alert triage, escalation, and remediation to closure against risk-based targets. Security strategy, policy, and formal risk acceptance remain with the Head of Information Technology.
- Holds consultants, contractors, managed service providers, carriers, and technology vendors accountable for service levels, quality, commitments, communication, and corrective action.
SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITY
Directly supervises the Infrastructure team, including hiring recommendations, performance reviews, coaching, corrective action, development, workload, coverage, and succession planning.
KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS REQUIRED
- Working technical knowledge of routing, switching, wireless, WAN/Internet connectivity, SD-WAN/SASE, firewalls, and network security in multivendor environments (for example, Cisco, Juniper, and Netskope).
- Understanding of Azure/AWS infrastructure, servers, virtualization, storage, backup/recovery, high availability, and disaster recovery.
- Understanding of Active Directory, Entra ID, DNS, DHCP, PKI, authentication, privileged access, Microsoft 365, and endpoint management (for example, Intune).
- Working knowledge of security operations, including EDR and vulnerability management (for example, SentinelOne and Rapid7).
- Working understanding of voice/unified communications, Zoom Rooms infrastructure, application/database operations, and legal-industry platforms (for example, Relativity and iManage) sufficient to manage staff, dependencies, incidents, projects, and escalations.
EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENTS
Bachelor's degree or equivalent relevant professional experience. Seven or more years of progressively responsible enterprise technology experience, including meaningful infrastructure experience, and three or more years leading or managing technical professionals strongly preferred.
Demonstrated experience developing technical staff, managing projects and major incidents, improving operations, managing vendors, and communicating technical risk. Professional-services or confidentiality-sensitive experience preferred. Certifications are beneficial but do not substitute for demonstrated judgment and leadership.
PERFORMANCE EXPECTATIONS
Numeric targets will be set annually from approved service baselines and reviewed quarterly with the Head of Information Technology. Performance will be evaluated on:
- People leadership: documented primary and secondary coverage for critical systems, cross-training progress, staff development, and accountability.
- Operational excellence: availability of critical services, repeat incidents, monitoring and documentation coverage, end-of-life exposure, and operational acceptance of new technology.
- Delivery and change: change success rate, incidents caused by change, milestone performance, and forecast accuracy.
- Security and resilience: EDR coverage, vulnerabilities remediated within risk-based targets, restore and disaster recovery tests completed on schedule (including data center failover), corrective actions closed, and vendor performance.
PHYSICAL DEMANDS AND AVAILABILITY
Work is performed primarily in an office environment with regular computer use and in-person, virtual, and written communication, with periodic access to data center, network, and equipment spaces.
Although not a primary member of the on-call rotation, the manager actively engages in significant incidents, critical changes, and escalations when leadership is required, including outside business hours. The manager provides additional support as directed by the Head of Information Technology, and this description may change based on business and technology needs.
The estimated salary range for this position is $137,000 - $145,000 per year. This is an exempt position not eligible for overtime. Actual pay will be adjusted based on experience and other job related factors permitted by law.
Robins Kaplan LLP is not accepting recruiter submissions for this position.
It is the policy of Robins Kaplan LLP to provide equal employment opportunities for all without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, age, national origin, disability or any other status protected by federal, state or local law. It is also our policy to work with individuals with disabilities when reasonable accommodations, sufficient to allow a person with a disability to perform the essential functions of their job, may be needed. It is our policy to be a workplace free from illegal discrimination and harassment.