Senior Manager of Research Storage & Data Infrastructure
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital
Summary
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.
Job description
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.
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.
Requirements
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in business administration, computer science, data science, information science or related field.
- 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.
- Experience managing storage technologies across on-premises, colocation, and/or cloud environments (highly preferred).
- Experience working with storage vendors, managed service providers, or strategic technology partners (highly preferred).
- Strong understanding of storage architecture, capacity planning, backup, replication, data protection, disaster recovery, business continuity, on-premises and cloud data storage, and performance optimization (highly preferred).
- Demonstrated success leading operational service delivery and infrastructure lifecycle management (highly preferred).
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills (highly preferred).
- Experience supporting high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), scientific computing, or large-scale research environments (preferred).
- Experience administering or supporting IBM Storage Scale (GPFS), Lustre, or comparable parallel file systems (preferred).
- Familiarity with object storage platforms and S3-compatible architectures (preferred).
- Experience designing and operating multi-tiered storage ecosystems spanning flash, disk, archive, cloud, and replication tiers (preferred).
- Knowledge of leveraging local NVMe resources, burst buffers, caching layers, or node-local storage to accelerate AI and HPC workloads (preferred).
- Experience supporting genomics, imaging, microscopy, or other high-throughput research data pipelines (preferred).
- Experience with storage benchmarking, observability platforms, telemetry, and capacity forecasting (preferred).
- Knowledge of disaster recovery, business continuity, cyber resilience, and data protection frameworks (preferred).
- Experience supporting GPU computing, distributed AI training, and large-scale analytics platforms (preferred).
Benefits
- Health insurance
- Retirement benefits
- Professional development
- Work-life balance programs
Company overview
St. Jude Children's Research Hospital is a world-renowned pediatric research and treatment institution headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, dedicated to advancing cures for childhood cancer and other catastrophic diseases. Founded in 1962 by entertainer Danny Thomas, it stands as the first and only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center devoted exclusively to children. The hospital operates on a unique funding model where families never receive bills for treatment, travel, housing, or food, with costs exceeding $2 billion annually primarily supported by donations through its fundraising organization ALSAC. St. Jude treats approximately 8,600 patients each year from all 50 states and around the world, with a focus on acute lymphoblastic leukemia, brain tumors, sickle cell disease, and infectious diseases. The institution employs over 7,000 staff members and maintains eight affiliate clinics across the United States. Through its St. Jude Global initiative, the hospital shares research and treatment protocols internationally, partnering with more than 350 institutions in over 90 countries. St. Jude has been instrumental in increasing childhood cancer survival rates from 20% in 1962 to over 80% today, while maintaining a robust research program that includes gene therapy, bone marrow transplantation, and precision medicine approaches.