Chief Information Officer

About The Kennedy Center

"I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit." - President John F. Kennedy

The Kennedy Center is the nation's cultural center and living memorial to President John F. Kennedy. Located on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., the Center presents performances across all genres, and is also home to artistic affiliates Washington National Opera and National Symphony Orchestra.

At the Kennedy Center, we strive to foster belonging and empowerment at work. We are able to advance our mission because of our committed and passionate employees. We are fortunate to be able to leverage their diverse perspectives, life experiences and skills to inform how our workplace can be a safe, transparent, and replenishing community. The Kennedy Center is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate against any employee or applicant based on race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law.

Mission Statement: As the nation's performing arts center, and a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy, we are a leader for the arts across America and around the world, reaching and connecting with artists, inspiring and educating communities. We welcome all to create, experience, learn about, and engage with the arts.

Why Join Us

We offer a total rewards package to all full-time employees to include:

• Staff offers for discount tickets
• Retirement plan with organization matching (after 1 year of employment)
• Qualifying employer for the Public Student Loan Forgiveness Program (PSLF)
• Commuter programs including pre-tax options for discounted parking and SmartBenefits (WMATA)
• Annual Leave, Sick Leave, and Personal Days available immediately upon hire
• 11 paid holidays per year
• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits with FSA and HSA options, and paid FMLA
• Flexible work arrangements
• We like to have fun! Check out the Kennedy Center National Dance Day 2024 staff video!

Pay Details

The Kennedy Center strives to design equitable compensation programs. The projected salary range for this position is $250,000 - $325,000, commensurate with experience, and includes a comprehensive benefits package. This is the targeted range of possible compensation for this role at the time of posting. This range may be modified in the future. Base pay within the range is ultimately determined by a candidate's skills, expertise, and experience as it relates to the position qualifications and responsibilities.

Job Description

The CIO will lead the development of the Kennedy Center's strategic technology direction, foster collaboration and community amongst KC's IT team and oversee the people and services of the KC's central Information Technology. The CIO will be a thought partner, collaborator, and source of innovative ideas to position technology in support of IT systems across KC locations. He/she/they will provide strong leadership, leverage expertise to help create world-class, strategic, scalable, and sustainable information technology capabilities of value to staff, visiting workers and performers and guests.

Services provided include campus-wide networking and support for secure remote access, hosting for the Center's public-facing website, intranet and self-hosted applications supporting sales and ticketing operations, donor management (Tessitura), financial and human resources management (Lawson), procurement, and parking operations. The Kennedy Center runs redundant, on-premise data centers, as well as hosted application servers in AWS. These environments are predominantly Microsoft based running Windows Servers and PCs, SQL Server databases and .net custom applications running on IIS. The Center also supports a custom Amazon Redshift Data Warehouse that is positioned for machine learning and offers real-time analytics and dashboards.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and manage technology initiatives, maintain existing applications, and develop new technical solutions to identify opportunities for the company to gain a competitive advantage
• Own and be the technical executive sponsor of Kennedy Center's ongoing digital transformation efforts that include migration of legacy and proprietary systems to SaaS-based platforms including UKG and Sage Intacct
• Ensure that adequate and appropriate measures are in place to protect the privacy and security of Kennedy Center assets
• Implement an AI strategy
• Create a technology roadmap that supports long-term, organizations-wide priorities ensuring the infrastructure is built to be scalable, flexible, and sustainable
• Develop and maintain a collaborative and productive relationship with all stakeholders to enable thorough understanding of their business models, needs, challenges and future strategies and partner with them to explore and provide technology solutions that optimize their business or artistic results. Keep abreast of developing technology and advise stakeholders as to features, advantages and costs
• Understand current technology trends and be able to identify any risk to the business for communication to the senior leadership team
• Lead the development and implementation for best practices and standards in process, design, architecture, and operations of all aspects of service-oriented information technology delivery
• Identify problems, determine accuracy and relevance of information of information, use sound judgement to generate and evaluate alternatives and make recommendations
• Recruit/Retain, develop and manage a competent team of technology staff capable of maintaining and supporting current technology and delivering new solutions as needed. Ensure appropriate standards of performance for systems and staff are set, measured and achieved.
• In collaboration with stakeholders, prepare and communicate long-term and short-term IT plans to optimize the use of technology by the organization. Prepares and manages capital and operating budgets. Track and measure performance against goals (both solutions and staff)
• Other duties as assigned.

Key Qualifications

• 15 years' experience working in a technical field such as systems engineering, network engineering, software development, IT management.
• At least 5 years leading a significant IT function, providing and supporting computing services, tools and systems, managing budget, planning and staff
• Demonstrated ability to manage complex enterprise-wide technical transformation projects
• Demonstrated ability to analyze system needs, generate and assess options and facilitate the choosing of the best fit solutions.
• Demonstrated ability to undertake implementation of 3rd party systems, 3rd party customized systems, SaaS solutions and in house developed systems.
• Knowledge of and comfort with the principles of ITIL, SDLC
• Knowledge of and comfort with the core elements of data center management and optimization including virtualization, business continuity/disaster recovery planning, IaaS
• Experience overseeing a helpdesk function
• Experience overseeing compliance with PCI and other data privacy standards
• Excellent verbal and written communication, collaboration and people management skills

Additional Information

Travel up to 15% may be required.