Director of IT Operations

Ameris Bank is a purpose-driven company, dedicated to bringing financial peace of mind to communities, one person at a time. Whether a customer wants to grow their business, buy a home, or feel confident in their retirement plan, they have a partner in Ameris Bank. We serve customers in our locations across the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and nationwide through our extensive digital offerings and mobile app.

Delivering financial peace of mind starts with a team that values integrity and rewards ingenuity. At Ameris, you’ll find teammates who are inclusive, collaborative problem-solvers who go the extra mile to support one another and to meet every customer’s needs. When teammates are empowered and bring their diverse perspectives to the table, we create the best possible outcomes for our customers.

At Ameris, we know that a growth mindset is key for high performance and fosters an environment that prioritizes continuous improvement. Teammates have access to Employee Resource Groups that serve as advocates and purpose and how you can bring it to life as an Ameris Bank teammate.

The Director of IT Operations is a senior leadership role responsible for overseeing the IT infrastructure and operations of the organization. This position ensures the efficient and secure operation of the company's IT systems, supports business objectives, and drives technological innovation. The Director of IT Operations collaborates with other departments to align IT strategies with organizational goals and provides strategic direction for IT initiatives.

Performs other projects and duties as assigned.

• Define and execute the IT Operations strategy aligned to business objectives, OKRs, and risk appetite.
• Build and lead high-performing ops, platform, and service delivery teams; foster a culture of reliability, automation, and continuous improvement.
• Translate business priorities into operational roadmaps (capacity, resiliency, automation, tooling).
• Own end-to-end service delivery and support across incidents, requests, problems, changes, and releases.
• Establish SLAs/OLAs, SLOs/SLIs, and service catalogs, drive adherence and continuous service improvement.
• Chair CAB and ensure robust change control with strong pre-prod validation and automated guardrails.
• Lead major incident management (MIM), communications, and post-incident reviews with blameless RCAs.
• Oversee hybrid infrastructure (datacenter, network, endpoints) and multi-cloud (Azure/AWS) operations.
• Drive standardization and policy through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) (Terraform, Cloud Formation or relative tools).
• Ensure capacity planning, performance tuning, patching strategies, and lifecycle management.
• Govern configuration management baselines (Ansible, Chef, Puppet) and golden images.
• Implement SRE practices: error budgets, SLOs, toil reduction, and automated remediation.
• Build unified observability across logs, metrics, traces.
• Establish proactive alerting (noise reduction, correlation, AIOps) and meaningful runbooks with automated runbook execution.
• Automate provisioning, configuration, compliance checks, and patching (Terraform, Ansible, Power Shell DSC).
• Script and orchestrate workflows in Power Shell, Python, and Bash; promote reusable modules and internal tooling.
• Own CI/CD enablement for ops (Git Hub Actions, Azure Dev Ops, Git Lab CI) including policy checks, security scans, and automated rollbacks.
• Use RPA/workflow tools (Jira) for ticket triage, account provisioning, and recurring ops tasks.
• Adopt AIOps for anomaly detection, event correlation, and predictive incident prevention.
• Partner with engineering to provide paved roads: standardized CI/CD pipelines, artifact repositories, container registries, and internal developer platforms (IDP).
• Manage secrets and key management (Vault, AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault); enforce least privilege and rotation.
• Embed security-by-design into operations; ensure vulnerability management, patch SLAs, endpoint hardening (CIS/NIST).
• Maintain control evidence and audit readiness (as applicable).
• Implement zero trust principles (identity-first, segmentation, continuous verification) and strong identity governance.
• Lead operational risk assessments, drive remediation plans, and track residual risk.
• Own continuity planning, disaster recovery strategy, and runbooks; execute regular failover tests.
• Design for high availability and resilience (multi-region, backup and restore, RPO/RTO adherence).
• Manage budgets, forecasts, and unit economics (cost per service/app/user), with show-back/charge-back where needed.
• Drive cloud cost optimization (rightsizing, reservations, autoscaling, Fin Ops practices).
• Negotiate and manage vendor SLAs, MSAs, and performance; conduct periodic reviews and QBRs.
• Define standards, guardrails, and reference architectures; enforce via automation and pipeline gates.
• Maintain accurate CMDB/asset inventory with automated discovery and reconciliation.
• Ensure high-quality documentation (runbooks, service…