Project Executive Jobs in South Dakota
Project Executive jobs in South Dakota draw steady demand across construction, healthcare infrastructure, and government contracting, with openings ranging from mid-level project oversight to senior program leadership. Sioux Falls, Rapid City, and Pierre account for the largest share of active postings, where employers like Sanford Health, the South Dakota Department of Transportation, and Mortenson Construction consistently hire project executives to lead complex capital and operational initiatives. The most in-demand specialties are healthcare facility development, transportation infrastructure, and technology modernization within state agencies. Scan the live roles below and apply to whichever ones fit.
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We’re building a world of health around every individual — shaping a more connected, convenient and compassionate health experience. At CVS Health®, you’ll be surrounded by passionate colleagues who care deeply, innovate with purpose, hold ourselves accountable and prioritize safety and quality in everything we do. Join us and be part of something bigger – helping to simplify health care one person, one family and one community at a time.
Job Description
The Executive Director, AI Infrastructure & Platform Engineering is a senior engineering leadership role responsible for standing up, operating, and continuously improving CVS Health's on-premises AI compute platform. This position owns the physical and platform layers of CVS’s Enterprise AI Factory — a frontier-class GPU compute environment running NVIDIA Blackwell systems across a high-throughput RoCE v2 fabric, hosted in co-located data center facilities, with multi-site expansion underway.
Reporting to the Global Head of Infrastructure/AI Operations and Service Delivery, this leader will establish operational baselines across the full infrastructure stack — hardware, network fabric, GPU clusters, storage, and the operating systems and orchestration layers above — and build the Site Reliability Engineering practice that delivers the availability, reliability, and performance that frontier AI workloads demand.
This is a greenfield organizational build. The Executive Director will define the operating model, set the engineering standards, hire and develop the team, and establish the long-term operations capability that will govern CVS's AI infrastructure for years ahead.
Key Responsibilities
Strategy and Leadership:
- Define and execute the long-range vision and strategy for AI infrastructure and platform engineering, with availability (>99.99%), reliability, and platform performance as the primary measures of success.
- Recruit, hire, develop, and retain a high-performing engineering organization spanning infrastructure, network, platform reliability, observability, security, 24/7 operations, change and release management, and FinOps.
- Establish clear ownership, accountability, and performance expectations across all functional teams; foster a culture of operational excellence, engineering rigor, and continuous improvement.
- Provide executive-level communication to senior leadership on platform status, milestones, risk posture, and strategic initiatives.
Infrastructure and Platform Engineering:
- Own the physical layer of the AI compute environment — GPU compute, storage, network fabric, capacity planning, and hardware lifecycle accountability.
- Direct bare-metal Kubernetes and OpenShift operations, including cluster administration, GPU quota governance, infrastructure-as-code adoption, and availability baseline enforcement.
- Govern high-performance network fabric operations — RoCE v2, spine-leaf topology, lossless Ethernet tuning, congestion management, and segmentation.
- Establish and enforce operational baselines across every layer of the stack — hardware, fabric, platform, and workload — with deviations detected, escalated, and resolved within defined SLAs.
- Direct Innovation POD strategy to develop self-healing and autonomous capabilities that proactively prevent service degradation before it impacts availability.
Operations and Reliability:
- Build and sustain a high-performing 24/7 operations model — designed for sustainable, predictable coverage with no mandatory overtime and measurable team health and retention.
- Drive end-to-end observability across the physical and platform layers, with continuous feedback loops connecting monitoring data to incident response, change decisions, and improvement cycles.
- Oversee change management so every modification is risk-assessed, monitored during rollout, and baseline-validated post-deployment.
- Ensure configuration consistency and drift detection across all platform components to prevent baseline degradation over time.
- Lead GPU FinOps governance — utilization optimization, tenant quota enforcement, and cost reduction — in partnership with the Finance organization.
Security and Compliance:
- Empower the Security SRE Lead to maintain a world-class security posture across the infrastructure and platform layers, with robust compliance to frameworks including HIPAA and NIST AI RMF.
- Govern access controls, audit logging, vulnerability management, and network segmentation across the AI compute environment.
Program Transition and Operating Model:
- Lead the operational transition from program-launch staffing to permanent CVS-owned operations — governing phased handoffs, competency validation, and milestone sign-offs to ensure minimal disruption to platform availability and business operations.
- Establish and lead the long-term operating model by institutionalizing key technical, architectural, and delivery leadership capabilities into permanent CVS roles, ensuring the organization is fully self-sustaining at program close.
Vendor and Stakeholder Management:
- Own vendor relationships, contract performance, and accountability across the hardware, networking, platform, and managed-services stack.
- Manage budget ownership for the AI infrastructure and platform engineering organization, including capital planning and operational expense governance.
Required Qualifications
The successful candidate will demonstrate technical depth, executive presence, and a proven record of operating physical infrastructure at data center scale. The ideal candidate will bring the following experience, knowledge, and abilities:
- 10+ years of engineering leadership experience, with substantial time directly owning physical infrastructure at data center scale — including hardware lifecycle, capacity planning, and facility coordination (power, cooling, rack-and-stack execution).
- Hands-on production ownership of bare-metal Kubernetes or OpenShift. Managed cloud services (EKS, GKE, AKS) alone do not substitute for the practitioner expertise this role requires.
- Fluency with high-speed cluster fabrics — RoCE v2, InfiniBand, EVPN-VXLAN, or carrier-grade equivalent — and the operational discipline these fabrics require (PFC, ECN, lossless tuning, congestion management).
- 5+ years leading multiple technical teams simultaneously, including 24/7 operations organizations, with measurable team health, retention, and performance outcomes.
- Proven success establishing and enforcing operational baselines, SLO / SLI / error-budget frameworks, and observability-driven continuous improvement in physical-infrastructure-anchored environments.
- Hardware lifecycle, vendor accountability, and facility coordination experience — including capacity planning, RMA management, and multi-vendor escalation.
- Experience leading operational transitions or organizational build-outs at scale, with business continuity and minimal disruption as non-negotiables.
- Executive-level stakeholder communication, vendor negotiation, and budget ownership.
Preferred Qualifications
- Hands-on experience with Cisco UCS, NVIDIA HGX / DGX / Blackwell systems, and VAST or comparable distributed NVMe storage.
- Direct experience operating GPU clusters of 32 or more GPUs in production environments — including HPC, AI training, research computing, or comparable workloads.
- NVIDIA AI Enterprise, NVIDIA Run:AI, NVIDIA Base Command Manager, or comparable GPU orchestration platform experience.
- Healthcare or other regulated-industry background (HIPAA, NIST AI RMF, SOX, FedRAMP, ITAR).
- Chaos engineering and AI-driven operations experience — predictive alerting and automated remediation patterns.
- Background in innovation programs, POD structures, or centers of excellence.
Education
- Required: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related technical field.
Pay Range
The typical pay range for this role is:
$175,100.00 - $334,750.00
This pay range represents the base hourly rate or base annual full-time salary for all positions in the job grade within which this position falls. The actual base salary offer will depend on a variety of factors including experience, education, geography and other relevant factors. This position is eligible for a CVS Health bonus, commission or short-term incentive program in addition to the base pay range listed above. This position also includes an award target in the company’s equity award program.
Our people fuel our future. Our teams reflect the customers, patients, members and communities we serve and we are committed to fostering a workplace where every colleague feels valued and that they belong.
Great benefits for great people
We take pride in offering a comprehensive and competitive mix of pay and benefits that reflects our commitment to our colleagues and their families.
This full‑time position is eligible for a comprehensive benefits package designed to support the physical, emotional, and financial well‑being of colleagues and their families. The benefits for this position include medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off, retirement savings options, wellness programs, and other resources, based on eligibility.
Additional details about available benefits are provided during the application process and on Benefits Moments.
We anticipate the application window for this opening will close on: 09/30/2026
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state and local laws.
We’re building a world of health around every individual — shaping a more connected, convenient and compassionate health experience. At CVS Health®, you’ll be surrounded by passionate colleagues who care deeply, innovate with purpose, hold ourselves accountable and prioritize safety and quality in everything we do. Join us and be part of something bigger – helping to simplify health care one person, one family and one community at a time.
Job Description
The Executive Director, AI Infrastructure & Platform Engineering is a senior engineering leadership role responsible for standing up, operating, and continuously improving CVS Health's on-premises AI compute platform. This position owns the physical and platform layers of CVS’s Enterprise AI Factory — a frontier-class GPU compute environment running NVIDIA Blackwell systems across a high-throughput RoCE v2 fabric, hosted in co-located data center facilities, with multi-site expansion underway.
Reporting to the Global Head of Infrastructure/AI Operations and Service Delivery, this leader will establish operational baselines across the full infrastructure stack — hardware, network fabric, GPU clusters, storage, and the operating systems and orchestration layers above — and build the Site Reliability Engineering practice that delivers the availability, reliability, and performance that frontier AI workloads demand.
This is a greenfield organizational build. The Executive Director will define the operating model, set the engineering standards, hire and develop the team, and establish the long-term operations capability that will govern CVS's AI infrastructure for years ahead.
Key Responsibilities
Strategy and Leadership:
- Define and execute the long-range vision and strategy for AI infrastructure and platform engineering, with availability (>99.99%), reliability, and platform performance as the primary measures of success.
- Recruit, hire, develop, and retain a high-performing engineering organization spanning infrastructure, network, platform reliability, observability, security, 24/7 operations, change and release management, and FinOps.
- Establish clear ownership, accountability, and performance expectations across all functional teams; foster a culture of operational excellence, engineering rigor, and continuous improvement.
- Provide executive-level communication to senior leadership on platform status, milestones, risk posture, and strategic initiatives.
Infrastructure and Platform Engineering:
- Own the physical layer of the AI compute environment — GPU compute, storage, network fabric, capacity planning, and hardware lifecycle accountability.
- Direct bare-metal Kubernetes and OpenShift operations, including cluster administration, GPU quota governance, infrastructure-as-code adoption, and availability baseline enforcement.
- Govern high-performance network fabric operations — RoCE v2, spine-leaf topology, lossless Ethernet tuning, congestion management, and segmentation.
- Establish and enforce operational baselines across every layer of the stack — hardware, fabric, platform, and workload — with deviations detected, escalated, and resolved within defined SLAs.
- Direct Innovation POD strategy to develop self-healing and autonomous capabilities that proactively prevent service degradation before it impacts availability.
Operations and Reliability:
- Build and sustain a high-performing 24/7 operations model — designed for sustainable, predictable coverage with no mandatory overtime and measurable team health and retention.
- Drive end-to-end observability across the physical and platform layers, with continuous feedback loops connecting monitoring data to incident response, change decisions, and improvement cycles.
- Oversee change management so every modification is risk-assessed, monitored during rollout, and baseline-validated post-deployment.
- Ensure configuration consistency and drift detection across all platform components to prevent baseline degradation over time.
- Lead GPU FinOps governance — utilization optimization, tenant quota enforcement, and cost reduction — in partnership with the Finance organization.
Security and Compliance:
- Empower the Security SRE Lead to maintain a world-class security posture across the infrastructure and platform layers, with robust compliance to frameworks including HIPAA and NIST AI RMF.
- Govern access controls, audit logging, vulnerability management, and network segmentation across the AI compute environment.
Program Transition and Operating Model:
- Lead the operational transition from program-launch staffing to permanent CVS-owned operations — governing phased handoffs, competency validation, and milestone sign-offs to ensure minimal disruption to platform availability and business operations.
- Establish and lead the long-term operating model by institutionalizing key technical, architectural, and delivery leadership capabilities into permanent CVS roles, ensuring the organization is fully self-sustaining at program close.
Vendor and Stakeholder Management:
- Own vendor relationships, contract performance, and accountability across the hardware, networking, platform, and managed-services stack.
- Manage budget ownership for the AI infrastructure and platform engineering organization, including capital planning and operational expense governance.
Required Qualifications
The successful candidate will demonstrate technical depth, executive presence, and a proven record of operating physical infrastructure at data center scale. The ideal candidate will bring the following experience, knowledge, and abilities:
- 10+ years of engineering leadership experience, with substantial time directly owning physical infrastructure at data center scale — including hardware lifecycle, capacity planning, and facility coordination (power, cooling, rack-and-stack execution).
- Hands-on production ownership of bare-metal Kubernetes or OpenShift. Managed cloud services (EKS, GKE, AKS) alone do not substitute for the practitioner expertise this role requires.
- Fluency with high-speed cluster fabrics — RoCE v2, InfiniBand, EVPN-VXLAN, or carrier-grade equivalent — and the operational discipline these fabrics require (PFC, ECN, lossless tuning, congestion management).
- 5+ years leading multiple technical teams simultaneously, including 24/7 operations organizations, with measurable team health, retention, and performance outcomes.
- Proven success establishing and enforcing operational baselines, SLO / SLI / error-budget frameworks, and observability-driven continuous improvement in physical-infrastructure-anchored environments.
- Hardware lifecycle, vendor accountability, and facility coordination experience — including capacity planning, RMA management, and multi-vendor escalation.
- Experience leading operational transitions or organizational build-outs at scale, with business continuity and minimal disruption as non-negotiables.
- Executive-level stakeholder communication, vendor negotiation, and budget ownership.
Preferred Qualifications
- Hands-on experience with Cisco UCS, NVIDIA HGX / DGX / Blackwell systems, and VAST or comparable distributed NVMe storage.
- Direct experience operating GPU clusters of 32 or more GPUs in production environments — including HPC, AI training, research computing, or comparable workloads.
- NVIDIA AI Enterprise, NVIDIA Run:AI, NVIDIA Base Command Manager, or comparable GPU orchestration platform experience.
- Healthcare or other regulated-industry background (HIPAA, NIST AI RMF, SOX, FedRAMP, ITAR).
- Chaos engineering and AI-driven operations experience — predictive alerting and automated remediation patterns.
- Background in innovation programs, POD structures, or centers of excellence.
Education
- Required: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related technical field.
Pay Range
The typical pay range for this role is:
$175,100.00 - $334,750.00
This pay range represents the base hourly rate or base annual full-time salary for all positions in the job grade within which this position falls. The actual base salary offer will depend on a variety of factors including experience, education, geography and other relevant factors. This position is eligible for a CVS Health bonus, commission or short-term incentive program in addition to the base pay range listed above. This position also includes an award target in the company’s equity award program.
Our people fuel our future. Our teams reflect the customers, patients, members and communities we serve and we are committed to fostering a workplace where every colleague feels valued and that they belong.
Great benefits for great people
We take pride in offering a comprehensive and competitive mix of pay and benefits that reflects our commitment to our colleagues and their families.
This full‑time position is eligible for a comprehensive benefits package designed to support the physical, emotional, and financial well‑being of colleagues and their families. The benefits for this position include medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off, retirement savings options, wellness programs, and other resources, based on eligibility.
Additional details about available benefits are provided during the application process and on Benefits Moments.
We anticipate the application window for this opening will close on: 09/30/2026
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state and local laws.
See All 26 Project Executive Jobs in South Dakota
Find roles in South Dakota that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find Project Executive JobsProject Executive Jobs by City in South Dakota
Where South Dakota roles are concentrated, by current openings.
Project Executive Job Market in South Dakota
A snapshot from current South Dakota openings, updated as new roles post.
Who's Hiring
- Sanford Health4
- Sodexo2
- CVS Health2
- The Bancorp2
- QXO1
Top Industries Hiring
- Healthcare & Medical Services6
- Food & Beverage3
- Media & Entertainment2
- Banking & Financial Services2
- Biotechnology & Pharmaceuticals2
What South Dakota Employers Look For
The qualifications that appear most often in project executive jobs across South Dakota.
- Bachelor's degree in construction management, engineering, business, or a related field required
- Seven or more years of progressive project management experience in a relevant South Dakota industry
- PMP certification or equivalent credential strongly preferred by South Dakota employers
- Demonstrated experience managing multi-million-dollar budgets and cross-functional project teams
- Familiarity with South Dakota state contracting requirements and public procurement processes
- Strong communication skills for coordinating with South Dakota regulatory bodies and stakeholders
Project Executive Jobs in South Dakota: Frequently Asked Questions
How do you become a project executive in South Dakota?
Most project executives in South Dakota follow a path that begins with a bachelor's degree in construction management, engineering, business administration, or a related discipline, followed by several years in project management roles. While South Dakota does not require a state-issued license specifically for project executives, many employers expect a Project Management Professional credential from PMI. Those entering healthcare infrastructure or state agency work often build experience through program coordinator or project manager roles at institutions like Sanford Health or state government agencies before advancing.
Which companies hire project executives in South Dakota?
Employers hiring project executives in South Dakota right now include Sanford Health, Sodexo, and CVS Health, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of July 2026. South Dakota's mix of large healthcare systems, state infrastructure agencies, and regional construction firms creates consistent demand for senior project leadership across multiple sectors.
Which South Dakota cities have the most project executive jobs?
Sioux Falls, Rapid City, and South Dakota account for the most project executive openings in South Dakota. Sioux Falls dominates due to its concentration of healthcare systems, corporate headquarters, and commercial construction activity, while Rapid City drives demand through tourism infrastructure, tribal enterprise projects, and regional government contracts, and Pierre produces openings tied directly to state agency capital programs and technology initiatives.
Are there remote project executive jobs in South Dakota?
Yes, but they're less common than in purely desk-based fields, since project executives in South Dakota frequently oversee on-site construction, agency operations, or healthcare facility work that requires physical presence. About 21% of project executive openings tied to South Dakota are remote or hybrid as of July 2026, with the remote share concentrated in technology program management and state IT modernization roles where day-to-day oversight does not require a fixed location.
How can I get hired as a project executive in South Dakota with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path is through a project coordinator or assistant project manager role at a large South Dakota employer, then building toward executive responsibility over time. Sanford Health hires entry-level project coordinators for facilities and IT initiatives, and the South Dakota Bureau of Information and Telecommunications brings in associate program staff for technology projects. Earning a Certified Associate in Project Management credential before applying gives candidates a measurable edge, and lateral moves from roles like construction superintendent, operations analyst, or program administrator are common stepping stones.
Where can I find and apply to project executive jobs in South Dakota?
You can find and apply to project executive jobs in South Dakota on Migrate Mate, which lists current openings across Sioux Falls, Rapid City, Pierre, and the rest of the state. Search the available roles, find the ones that match your background and target industry, and apply directly to the employers posting them.
See All 26 Project Executive Jobs in South Dakota
Find roles in South Dakota that match your experience and apply in just a few clicks.
Find Project Executive Jobs