Team Lead, Cloud Operations

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Reporting to Manager, Cloud Operations, you will be responsible for supervising day-to-day activities of your team managing Varicent's global cloud infrastructure. Leading a regional team, you will strive for predictable operations and consistent service delivery adhering to established SLA’s. Key responsibilities include continuous coaching and development of Cloud Operations engineers, implementing improvement initiatives, fostering team engagement, acting as the primary escalation point, and nurturing effective collaboration with counterparts within Cloud Operations and the rest of the organization. Understanding, owning and consistently executing Cloud Operations processes will be a key success factor in managing your team.

What You'll Do: 

• Lead a small regional team of Cloud Operations engineers, ensuring their productivity and efficiency.
• Own your team’s on-call process for Incident and Change Management staffing rotations.
• Implement strategies to improve efficiency and productivity of the Cloud Operations team and the cloud infrastructure.
• Be flexible to support your team and Cloud Operations global collaboration efforts across multiple time zones.
• Establish and maintain effective communication and consistent reporting deliverables with direct and senior management.
• Lead and develop engineers. Provide support and mentoring by utilizing existing and creating new opportunities to enhance their technology skills and experience.
• Be accountable for your team’s consistent level of engagement.
• Adopt hands-on approach and drive towards show me / don’t tell me results driven culture.
• Work closely with other Cloud Operations leads and development, testing and architecture teams to optimize cloud workflows and automate processes reducing time-to-market and increasing service quality and infrastructure efficiency.
• Drive the adoption of Cloud Operations best practices across the organization, ensuring consistency and standardization across global teams.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design and implement global Cloud Operations initiatives that improve efficiency and increase productivity.
• Define, continuously monitor, and analyze team performance metrics and identify areas for improvement.
• Act as an escalation point for incident resolutions and ensure postmortems are created and actioned and resolved.
• Own and measure team responsiveness to all service connection points as per set expectations.
• Ensure consistent adherence to Change Management process with the objective of zero incidents resulting from change.
• Collaborate with other team leads on development and implementation of personal growth and training programs for the Cloud Operations team to improve skills and stay up to date with the latest cloud technologies and trends.
• Ensure compliance with security and regulatory requirements in Cloud Operations.
• Make sure operational documentation and knowledge base is created, accurate and up to date.

What You'll Bring:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field.
• 5 years, hands on, technical experience in Cloud Operations or a related field with SLAs of upward 99.9%.
• 3 years experience leading and managing a team of 3-5 in a Cloud Operations environment.
• Practical, hands-on experience in cloud computing platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP or IBM Cloud, as well as cloud automation and orchestration tools.
• Proven technical expertise with Linux / Windows systems administration in both physical and virtual environments.
• In depth understanding of core networking concepts, IP space, subnetting, DNS, VPN.
• Hands-on experience with service logging, infrastructure and performance monitoring solutions in the context of Service and Incident Management, both open source and commercial.
• Solid understanding of Release Management with hands on experience with CI/CD pipeline development and management.
• Practical experience working with enterprise databases, incremental vs. full backups, restores.
• Proficiency in measurable process improvements that increase efficiency and productivity.
• Solid experience with Jira or other Service Management platform enhancing workflows, and as a tool for measuring team and individual performance.
• Well organized with ability to communicate concisely and clearly; create technical presentations and executive summary to back your ideas.
• Excellent collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams and stakeholders across different geographies and time zones.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work in a fast-paced environment.
• Certifications in Cloud Operations or related fields are a plus.

Success Factors:

In the short term (30 days) you will:

• Get to know your team, your peers and their teams.
• Get familiar with organizational structure, culture, purpose, and goals.
• Understand Cloud Operations goals and KPI’s as well as their delivery cadence.
• Understand our SaaS products, services and technologies that power our services.
• Learn our core operational functions and day to day deliverables.
• Participate in incident reviews, maintenance planning activities, and change reviews.
• Learn and review existing performance metrics and objectives for your team and individual goals of your team members.
• Learn how we monitor service performance and technologies behind them.

In the medium term (30-60 days) you will:

• Get an intimate knowledge of your team, our day-to-day activities, our Jira, and other governance processes.
• Understand your team’s technical capabilities and each individual members growth plan.
• Know in detail team functions across Incident / Service / Release / Change Management domains.
• Learn intricacies of managing your team in a global, following the sun model support environment.
• Learn key differences in countries laws and procedures.
• Obtain intimate understanding of your team resources utilization across all operational functions and how team fluctuations impact services delivery.
• Establish yourself as a technology savvy Varicent subject matter expert ready to dive in and troubleshoot with your team as needed.
• Lead consistent review and reporting processes to ensure your team and individual performance.
• Identify redundancies and plan for process / technology improvements to remove manual work and improve inefficient workflows.

In the long term (90-120 days) you will: 

• Own your team’s execution of operational processes, with focus on Incident / Service / Release and Change Management domains.
• Ensure team performance consistency (weekly, monthly and beyond), through continuous review, reporting and feedback loop.
• Establish yourself as a leader, mentor, and coach for your team, and trusted and reliable business partner across organizational peers.
• Lead your team through their personal training and growth plans, adjusting as necessary to align with business needs.
• Ensure smooth onboarding of new products and services.
• Own your teams’ and relevant Cloud Operations reporting deliverables at established cadence.
• Strive for excellence, challenge yourself and team by pushing the goal posts out.
• Measure consistent responsiveness to incidents across all time zones, prompt incident resolution, and creation of action plan to prevent incidents from recurring.
• Lead continuous improvements of the infrastructure, governance processes, and our SaaS products with meticulous attention to infrastructure and resource optimization.
• Continue growing your technology portfolio and skillsets to support Varicent products.