Alfred Rivera, the career defense information technology executive who currently serves as the director of the Defense Information Systems Agency’s development and business center, will retire from government in the coming weeks, the agency announced this week.

Rivera’s last day at DISA will be on Jan. 4, when he’ll be recognized in a retirement ceremony at the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters for 35 years of government service. He has spent the last 25 years at DISA.

Rivera began at the agency in 1992 as a young systems engineer, and within two years, rose to become the chief engineer for DISA’s Defense Enterprise Computing Centers. Since becoming a member of the Senior Executive Service in 2001, he’s held numerous leadership positions within the agency, including as its director of computing services, principal director of enterprise services and vice director for strategic plans.

“I really enjoyed doing the computing side and helping to evolve computing at DISA,” he said in a release provided by the agency. “When I got here, we had just inherited that responsibility. In fact, DISA had just become DISA in 1991 and we had inherited all these data centers which were not previously a core function of the agency.”

Among his proudest achievements, Rivera cited DISA’s implementation of Defense Enterprise Email, the cloud-based system that began as an email consolidation project for the Army and now serves 1.7 million users across the Defense Department. The project began while he was DISA’s director of enterprise services.

Rivera is a two-time winner of the Presidential Rank Award — once in 2006 for meritorious service and again in 2009 for distinguished service. He said he plans to work as a consultant following his retirement.

DISA has not yet named a long-term replacement to fill Rivera’s position. For the time being, Stuart Timerman, his deputy, will lead the development and business center.

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