VP, IT Operations

Hybrid: Markham, Ontario

Job Description: About Us Pet Valu is Canada’s leading pet specialty retailer, dedicated to strengthening the bond between dedicated pet lovers and their pets. With 50 years of animal care expertise, we operate over 800 stores across Canada under several banners, including Pet Valu, Bosley’s, Total Pet, Paulmac's Pet, Tisol & Chico. Guided by our mission to deliver products, care, expertise, and memorable moments, Pet Valu is a place where people build meaningful careers while making a positive impact on pets and communities.

Job Summary

The Vice President, IT Operations is accountable for the reliable, secure, resilient and cost-effective operation of Pet Valu’s production technology environment across stores, distribution centres, corporate locations and cloud services. Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, this executive leads the functions responsible for cybersecurity and governance, infrastructure and platform operations, retail technology operations, service management, service desk, store technology readiness, database operations, network and telecommunications, Microsoft 365 operations, technology resilience, observability, and technology asset and licence management. The role establishes a disciplined operating model that protects store uptime and employee productivity while enabling change at pace. The Vice President works closely with Engineering, Enterprise Applications, Architecture and BI, Retail Operations, Loss Prevention, Supply Chain, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, Internal Audit and external service providers. The role distinguishes platform and software ownership from operational ownership: Enterprise Applications owns business-platform roadmaps such as POS software, while IT Operations owns the reliability, support and hardware lifecycle required to run those platforms successfully. The target leadership team includes the Director, Cybersecurity & GRC; Senior Manager, Infrastructure & Platform Operations; Senior Manager, Retail Technology Operations; and Senior Manager, Change & Incident Management. Through these leaders, the role oversees specialist managers, service owners, leads and technical teams supporting infrastructure, cloud, networks, databases, store technology, desktop services, the Help Desk and operational governance.

Key Responsibilities

Operational Strategy

• Develop and execute an IT Operations strategy aligned with Pet Valu’s business priorities, growth plans, store experience, risk appetite and technology roadmap.
• Establish clear accountability, decision rights, service ownership and operating rhythms across infrastructure, security, retail technology, support and service management.
• Partner with the CTO and peer technology leaders to translate enterprise priorities into capacity plans, operational roadmaps and measurable service commitments.

Service Reliability, Incident and Change Management

• Accountable for availability, performance and recoverability of production technology services, with particular attention to store and revenue‑critical services.
• Establish enterprise service levels, operational health dashboards, alerting standards and executive reporting for availability, incidents, capacity, risk and customer experience.
• Provide executive leadership during major incidents, ensuring clear command, timely communication, business engagement, recovery focus and disciplined post‑incident learning.
• Ensure mature incident, problem, change, service‑level, knowledge and service‑catalogue practices that reduce repeat failures and improve safe change velocity.
• Drive permanent corrective action through root‑cause analysis, trend analysis, technical debt reduction and accountable remediation plans.

Infrastructure and Platform Operations

• Oversee cloud, compute, storage, backup, network, telecommunications, database, Microsoft 365, endpoint and platform‑engineering operations.
• Ensure lifecycle plans exist for servers, network equipment, firewalls, wireless access points, store technology, endpoints, databases, operating systems and foundational platforms.
• Establish patching, vulnerability remediation, backup, recovery, capacity, configuration and observability standards, with evidence‑based compliance reporting.
• Optimize platform cost and performance through capacity management, licence utilisation, cloud financial management, vendor rationalisation and automation.
• Clarify the boundary between developer‑facing DevOps and release engineering led by Engineering and cloud/platform operations led by IT Operations.

Retail Technology Operations

• Own the end‑to‑end operational health of technology used in stores, ensuring that store outcomes are managed beyond individual support tickets.
• Oversee POS h