Associate Director, Operations

Key Skills

AIOps, Ansible, Data science techniques, Design, Effective communication skills, IT, Kibana, KPIs, Machine learning techniques, Puppet, SLA

Job Description

He/she is also expected to manage the offshore operations team with responsibility for adequate staffing and rightly skilled resources to support production operations.

In addition, he/she has responsibility for driving improvements in operations with focus on monitoring and automation in the form of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). With additional responsibility to drive predictive monitoring, improve root cause analysis, service availability, reliability through reduction of incidents and event alerts and accelerate mean time to repair.

Major Incident Management

• Manage the Command Centre (incident managers, incident coordinators) in coordination of end-to-end incident management, ensuring that the major incident process and procedures are followed achieving high levels of customer satisfaction through timely and efficient resolution of incidents
• Drive the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the Major Incident Management process
• Proactively manage major incidents or potential major incidents ensuring satisfactory restoration of service with minimal business impact and resolution of incident in an efficient and timely manner initiating escalation procedures as appropriate.
• Chairs all major incident conference calls or war rooms
• Responsible for timely status update communications to stakeholders in accordance with process and procedures
• Manage the major incident response and resolution SLAs and KPIs

• Ensures that Standard Operating Procedures are in place for all alerts and that escalation to support teams is effective

24 x 7 End to End Monitoring

• Ensures that 24 x 7 monitoring and call outs are in place and working effectively
• Ensure that monitoring is in place for all critical applications and infrastructure
• Ensure that critical alerts are actioned on promptly before business impact
• Ensures that Standard Operating Procedures are in place for all alerts and that escalation to support teams is effective

Problem Management

• Drive for quality root cause analysis of incidents to determine appropriate preventive actions to prevent recurrence
• Ensure proper follow-up on corrective actions
• Drive proactive problem management of recurring incidents to drive down repeated incidents

AIOps

• Identify opportunities to automate operations
• Lead team in designing, building, testing and operationalizing use cases to automate operations and drive continuous improvements. These improvements include predictive monitoring, faster root cause analysis and accelerated mean time to repair (MTTR)
• Work closely with SRE teams to enhance system availability and reliability
• Act as product owner to drive adoption of AI Ops

Has team management and vendor management responsibilities:

1. Ensure team is rightly staffed to support operations
2. Ensure team is properly trained for their roles

Accountable for shared Operational KPIs including:

1. Drive incident reduction for critical applications and major incidents
2. Reduce resolution time for major incidents

    

Skills for Success:

• Minimum 10 years’ relevant experience in IT operations management
• Experience in applications management or infrastructure operations support
• Experience working with event monitoring tools and monitoring operations

Knowledge or working experience leading teams in these areas:

1. ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana)
2. Monitoring tools (e.g. Dynatrace)
3. Automation/Orchestration tools (e.g. Puppet, Ansible)
4. ServiceNow