System and Platform Operations Director

Job Description

Job DescriptionThe Director, System & Platform Operations is a technical leadership role that is responsible for the support, reliability and stability of CitrusAd production systems, environments and offerings. The team owns the reliability vision for the company, drivingcontinuous improvement through a combination of development and operations initiatives as well as process excellence. This position and their team has solid-line responsibility for operations including the deployment, management, monitoring, reporting, troubleshooting,and repair of production systems. Core to the success of the role is to provide a premium customer support experience focused on a "centre of excellence" that allows for a full-service delivery support cycle.The Platform Operations team is responsible for supporting all retailers once they are live. Critically important is how this team collaborates and liaises with other teams such as Customer Support, Client Integration Engineering, Engineering and Customer Successteams. This role ensures production stability and facilitates rapid release of new products and features by balancing the needs of delivery teams and business stakeholders. They ensure flawless ongoing operational functionality to meet increasing customerdemands. Collaborating closely with the Engineering team, they maintain system stability and support Customer Integration Engineering from an environments perspective. Additionally, they lead the team responsible for ensuring 24/7 service availability, crucialfor CitrusAds success.Responsibilities

• Operational Practices
  • Establish and manage operational practices and ensure we design, implement and operate a support model that is fit for purpose for our future.
• Production Monitoring and Operational Reporting
  • Adopt a "Measure Everything" approach to ensure that internal service level objectives and customer service levels agreements are exceeded including executive level reporting on operational health metrics such as SLAs, incident resolution, performance,availability, reliability, capacity etc.
• Customer Support & Incident Management
  • Own incident management processes and on call response.
• Change Management
  • Uphold processes and procedures to manage change across production platforms
• System Reliability
  • Work with the wider Engineering, Product, Delivery and Security teams to ensure that appropriate attention is given to production/system reliability.
• IT Service Management
  • Execute Service Management processes including Change, Config, Service Level, Performance, Incident and Problem Management to deliver a high level of support and system availability
• Leadership and Direction
  • Set and communicate the strategy for achieving the Groups mission, vision and values within the Technology and Operations space, together with the broad actions needed to implement it; inspire a large or diverse workforce to commit to these and to doingextraordinary things to achieve the organizations business goals.
• Performance Management
  • Manage and report on business performance; hold direct reports accountable for achievement of business plans, and take corrective action where necessary to ensure the achievement of business objectives, balancing the need to deliver short term businessobjectives with the longer term delivery of stakeholder value.
• Organisational Capability
  • Identify the capabilities needed to meet the current and emerging business needs of a significant function.
• Organisational Planning
  • Define the detailed organization structure to align with corporate principles, define the relationship between elements of the organization, and define the responsibilities of senior leaders, to enable the organization to achieve its business objectives.
• Technical Developments, Process Improvement and Simplification
  • Discuss and recommend more complex or innovative technical developments to improve the quality of software and supporting infrastructure to better meet users needs.
• Personal Capability Building
  • Develop own capabilities by participating in assessment and development planning activities as well as formal and informal training and coaching; gain or maintain external professional accreditation where relevant to improve performance and fulfill personalpotential. Maintain an in-depth understanding of technology, external regulation, and industry best practices through ongoing education, attending conferences, and reading specialist media

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

Strong people leadership skills with 2+ years leading Operations teams within enterprise environments with knowledge of DevOps, SRE, ITIL, Cloud Services, IT Infrastructure and Operations supporting and maintaining production and development environmentsand building cloud services that are secure, reliable, scalable and observable

Experience implementing and managing Logging, Monitoring and Alerting frameworks

Knowledge and experience of establishing deployment and automation pipelines

Have excellent communications and written skills, and must be able to talk about technology intelligently and passionately to all levels of an organisation including Developers, Architects and senior management (technical and non-technical)

Have strong organisational skills, and enjoy a dynamic and agile working environment

Experience in establishing support strategies to support SaaS or Cloud based backends with a particular focus on APM deployment (such as Dynatrace or other monitoring tools)

Experience with establishing Service Delivery strategies that align to new ways of work methods including Agile

Experience in successfully managing complex stakeholder relations.

Experience in leading and driving high-performance technical teams that are disparately located (international IT operations is a must)

Experience and understanding of international requirements relating to data/information security.

Experience in the design, development and management of commercial technology contracts, technical service level agreements, and KPIs

Experience of managed/outsourced services, commercial partners that have added intrinsic value to an organisationExtensive experience in the co-development of IT strategy relating to security protocols, processes, policies and standards relating to informat