POSITION SUMMARY
The Director, IT Operations is accountable for establishing and operating the service-management governance model for Client IT Operations. This leader will create the standards, operating discipline, governance, and management mechanisms required to deliver consistent, predictable, and transparent technology operations across a complex 24x7 BPaaS/EPaaS environment.
The role is designed to be a force multiplier for operational teams: strengthening Incident, Problem/RCA, Change, Release, Knowledge, and Service Governance practices while ensuring that technical ownership remains with the teams responsible for resolution. The Director will drive cross-functional accountability, executive-quality communications, and measurable continuous improvement across onshore and offshore delivery organizations.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Build and lead the Service Management Office, including the governance framework, operating cadence, standards, controls, templates, and performance mechanisms used across Client IT Operations.
- Own the service-management process framework for Incident Management, Problem Management/RCA, Change Management, Release Management, Knowledge Management, and related service-governance practices.
- Establish clear roles, decision rights, escalation paths, and accountability across Tech Ops, infrastructure/platform teams, product teams, implementation teams, Service Desk, customers, and third-party partners.
- Lead governance for major incidents and service disruptions, ensuring disciplined process execution, timely stakeholder engagement, effective bridge management, clear escalation, and high-quality internal and customer communications.
- Define and enforce RCA standards, including ownership, timelines, evidence quality, corrective/preventive actions, cross-functional follow-through, and closure governance.
- Lead Change and Release governance, including CAB effectiveness, production-readiness controls, risk assessment, rollback/testing expectations, release calendars, and post-change validation.
- Create consistent executive and customer communication standards for incidents, service health, operational risk, planned changes, and material service issues.
- Develop service governance scorecards and management reporting covering SLA performance, incident trends, change quality, RCA completion, recurring failure patterns, operational risk, and continuous-improvement commitments.
- Partner with technical leaders to identify systemic operational issues and convert recurring incidents, manual processes, and control gaps into prioritized improvement initiatives.
- Drive standardization across customer environments while allowing documented exceptions where contractual, technical, or customer-specific requirements demand variation.
- Partner with tooling and observability teams to improve ITSM workflows, Jira/JSM utilization, telemetry, alerting, automation, and the quality of operational data used for governance and decision-making.
- Establish and maintain service-management documentation, playbooks, templates, knowledge standards, and audit-ready evidence.
- Build an effective onshore/offshore operating model that uses follow-the-sun capabilities while maintaining appropriate leadership, customer engagement, and executive communication coverage.
- Develop SMO talent, establish measurable objectives, coach leaders and practitioners, and create a culture of ownership, transparency, urgency, and continuous improvement.
ROLE BOUNDARIES AND OPERATING PRINCIPLES
- The SMO owns the process, governance, communication standards, escalation discipline, and enforcement mechanisms; technical teams retain accountability for technical diagnosis, remediation, recovery, and permanent corrective action.
- Incident Management facilitates coordinated response and communication; the responsible Technical Operations Manager, Technical Lead, Technical Director, platform, product, or engineering owner remains accountable for technical resolution.
- The SMO is expected to challenge weak process execution, unclear ownership, inadequate evidence, missed commitments, and recurring operational failure regardless of organizational boundary.
- Governance must improve speed and quality of delivery; controls should be risk-based, measurable, and increasingly automated.
LEADERSHIP & STAKEHOLDER RESPONSIBILITIES
- Serve as a senior operational partner to the VP, Client IT Operations and other technology and business leaders.
- Influence across organizational boundaries without relying solely on direct reporting relationships.
- Provide concise, fact-based executive updates during high-severity events and periods of elevated operational risk.
- Build trusted working relationships with customer-facing leaders, Technical Operations Managers, Technical Directors, infrastructure/platform teams, product and implementation organizations, vendors, and offshore delivery leaders.
- Escalate systemic risks and accountability gaps early, with clear recommendations and decisions required.
REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS
- 10+ years of progressive experience in IT operations, service management, production support, technology delivery, or related disciplines, including significant leadership responsibility.
- Demonstrated leadership of enterprise Incident, Problem, Change, Release, or broader IT Service Management functions in complex, high-availability environments.
- Strong working knowledge of ITIL practices and the ability to translate frameworks into pragmatic operating processes rather than compliance-only administration.
- Experience leading major-incident response, executive/customer communications, RCA governance, and cross-functional remediation.
- Proven ability to design or materially improve service-management operating models, governance structures, workflows, metrics, and tooling.
- Experience operating across global onshore/offshore teams and 24x7 service environments.
- Strong analytical capability with experience using operational data, trends, and service metrics to identify risk and drive improvement.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex operational issues clearly to executives and customers.
- Demonstrated ability to drive accountability and change across teams where authority is distributed.
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Experience in healthcare technology, healthcare payer operations, BPaaS, SaaS, EPaaS, or other highly regulated/transaction-intensive environments.
- Experience with Jira Service Management (JSM), enterprise ITSM platforms, observability/monitoring platforms, PagerDuty or comparable on-call tooling, and workflow automation.
- Experience supporting environments with significant customer-specific integrations, data operations, third-party dependencies, and complex production release requirements.
MEASURES OF SUCCESS
- Consistent adoption of defined service-management standards across Client IT Operations.
- Improved major-incident execution, communication quality, escalation speed, and stakeholder confidence.
- Reduced repeat incidents through stronger RCA quality, corrective-action governance, and problem management.
- Improved change success rate and reduced change-related incidents through stronger readiness and risk controls.
- Clear, timely, and reliable operational reporting with fewer manual reconciliations and conflicting sources of truth.
- Reduced ambiguity in ownership and faster resolution of cross-functional operational issues.
- Measurable reduction in operational risk, process variance, and avoidable manual effort.
- A scalable SMO organization viewed by delivery teams as an enabler of better operations and by leadership as a reliable source of operational truth.
LEADERSHIP PROFILE
The successful candidate will be a pragmatic operator who combines service-management discipline with strong judgment, executive presence, and the willingness to hold teams accountable. This role requires someone who can move comfortably between a Sev1 bridge, an executive review, a customer discussion, a process-design session, and a data-driven operating review—and who understands that the objective of governance is better service outcomes.
Geographic Responsibility: Remote, US
Type of Employment: Full-time, permanent
FLSA Classification (USA Only): Exempt
Work Environment: The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job:
- The employee is occasionally required to move around the office. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, color vision, peripheral vision, depth perception, and ability to adjust focus.
- Work across multiple time zones in a hybrid or remote work environment.
- Long periods of time sitting and/or standing in front of a computer using video technology.
- May require travel dependent on company needs.
The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of the job being performed by the individual(s) assigned to this position. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, and skills required. HealthEdge reserves the right to modify, add, or remove duties and to assign other duties as necessary. In addition, reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of this position in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. Candidates may be required to go through a pre-employment criminal background check.
