Director, Enterprise Architecture and Infrastructure

Position Summary

Help build the infrastructure that keeps a growing defense manufacturer designing, producing, and delivering. Red Cat Holdings manufactures military unmanned aircraft and surface vessels across multiple divisions and sites. We are seeking a technically accomplished leader who can connect the architectural decisions made today with the reliability and scale our business needs tomorrow.

Reporting to the VP of Enterprise Systems and Manufacturing Integration, you will be Red Cats highest technical authority for enterprise IT infrastructure. You will lead five direct reports across infrastructure systems engineering, systems administration, and network engineering, and direct infrastructure delivery through our managed service provider. Your expertise will help the team evaluate designs, resolve complex dependencies, and deliver dependable services. Team members perform routine configuration and implementation; you remain accountable for technical decisions and results.

This role can be based at any of our manufacturing locations, with a strong preference for the corporate headquarters in Salt Lake City. Travel will be required several times per year.

- Salt Lake City, Utah

- Valdosta, Georgia

- West Palm Beach, Florida

- San Diego, California

- Torrance, California

- st-jean-sur-richelieu, Quebec

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Architecture and technical leadership

- Own the infrastructure architecture and roadmap across identity, networking, connectivity, cloud and on-premises hosting, compute, storage, virtualization, endpoint platforms, and shared services. Ensure designs work together across divisions, sites, tenants, and identity providers. Lead system integration efforts to minimize manual work and optimize data flow across the network.

- Establish practical technical standards and lead design reviews. Challenge assumptions, assess failure modes and dependencies, document architectural decisions, and guide engineers through complex technical problems.

- Plan infrastructure lifecycles, capacity, modernization, and technical debt reduction. Evaluate consolidation and cloud migration against reliability, performance, cost, security requirements, and the teams ability to operate the solution.

- Partner with manufacturing, and engineering application owners on hosting, connectivity, identity, capacity, and recovery. Application owners retain application standards, configuration, and business process design.

- Own endpoint platform engineering and its operating standards, partnering with the separate service desk and end-user support function on deployment, support handoffs, and recurring problems.

Team leadership and knowledge transfer

- Partner with IT Operations and Project Management to build out the Systems roadmap, manage capacity, and determine prioritization.

- Lead five direct reports, including employees located at other facilities. Set priorities and performance expectations, allocate work, coach engineers, develop skills, and recommend staffing changes based on service needs and capacity.

- Coordinate the MSPs infrastructure work with the internal team. Establish ownership, delivery expectations, escalation paths, and effective handoffs between engineering and operations.

- Require maintained architecture and network diagrams, service ownership and configuration records, runbooks, recovery procedures, and architectural decision records. Make documentation updates part of completing infrastructure changes.

- Build and verify support coverage so at least two people can support each critical service. Use cross-training, practical walkthroughs, and recovery exercises to demonstrate capability and reduce dependence on individual experts.

- Reliable operations and responsible investment

- Own infrastructure reliability, monitoring, capacity planning, backup integrity, and recovery readiness. Agree recovery objectives with business owners and demonstrate recoverability through documented tests.

- Establish controlled changes with impact assessment, testing, rollback plans, and appropriate approvals. Guide infrastructure automation and repeatable deployments that reduce errors and improve supportability.

- Lead infrastructure resolution of major incidents and ensure corrective actions address underlying causes. Communicate operational risks, dependencies, and progress clearly to technical and business stakeholders.

- Implement infrastructure security requirements in partnership with Cybersecurity, which retains policy, control, and risk responsibilities. Ensure technical decisions respect approved requirements and controlled-data boundaries.

- Assess vendor and managed-service performance, sourcing options, and total cost of ownership. Partner initially with the VP on business impact, financial analysis, and investment tradeoffs, preparing to assume infrastructure budget ownership.

- In your first 90 days, establish an accurate environment and dependency map, identify significant architectural and support gaps, introduce usable documentation and design-review standards, and propose a feasible roadmap for stabilization and growth.

Required Qualifications

- 10 or more years of progressive enterprise IT infrastructure experience, including at least five years leading technical teams, developing engineers, and delivering results through others.

- Experience in a complex manufacturing organization with multiple sites, multiple tenants, and multiple identity providers, including infrastructure supporting engineering and production continuity.

- Demonstrated architectural expertise across interconnected infrastructure domains, with the judgment to evaluate tradeoffs, identify dependencies, challenge designs, and guide specialists to sound solutions.

- Experience designing and operating both cloud and on-premises infrastructure and managing the dependencies between them.

- Strong Microsoft enterprise experience, including Active Directory, Microsoft Entra ID, Windows infrastructure, Microsoft 365, and Azure or related Microsoft cloud infrastructure.

- Experience improving service reliability, tested backup and recovery, change practices, documentation, and vendor or MSP delivery; ability to explain technical choices and costs to business leaders.

- Must be a U.S. Person as defined by applicable U.S. export-control regulations, including 22 CFR 120.62.

Desired Additional Qualifications

- Experience designing supported cross-cloud identity, access, and collaboration between Microsoft GCC High and commercial environments, including B2B access and lifecycle provisioning where supported.

- Defense or aerospace manufacturing experience; familiarity with CMMC, NIST SP 800-171, and infrastructure supporting controlled or export-controlled information.

- Experience with acquisitions, identity consolidation, site standardization, cloud migration, network segmentation, or MSP transitions.

- Experience supporting Windows, macOS, and Linux environments; Azure or AWS hosting; and the infrastructure behind tools such as SolidWorks PDM, GitLab, GitHub, or Jenkins.

- A relevant degree or equivalent practical experience; relevant architecture, cloud, networking, or service-management certifications, supported by demonstrated application.

Background Check

This position will require successfully completing a post-offer background check. Qualified candidates with a criminal history will be considered and are not automatically disqualified, consistent with federal and state law.

EEO and ITAR/EAR Work Authorization Disclosure

Red Cat Holdings provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This position requires direct or indirect access to hardware, software, technology or technical data controlled under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). Successful candidates for positions subject to ITAR/EAR restrictions must provide proof of U.S. Citizenship or Permanent Residence and must not require sponsorship for export-restricted work authorization.

E-Verify

The company participates E-Verify ensure eligibility for employment and compliance with Right to Work rules.

Compensation: Salary plus generous annual equity package and potential bonuses.