Run Operations Lead

Alter Domus is seeking a Run Operations & DevOps Leader to act as the operational bridge between Product Engineering and Tech Ops, including Infrastructure and Service Desk. This hands-on leadership role is accountable for ensuring that new and changed products enter production in a supportable, secure and resilient state, remain stable and scalable, and continuously improve through operational feedback. The role combines production operation Reliability Engineering and service management. The Senior Manager will lead and mentor a DevOps team, define engineering and automation standards, oversee hybrid cloud infrastructure and CI/CD capabilities, and coordinate high-impact production incidents. Working across Product, Engineering, Information Security, Infrastructure, Networking, Service Management and external partners, the role will champion a reliability-first culture and support services operating within a 24/7 model. RESPONSIBILITIES Operational Readiness and Service Transition • Define and maintain operational acceptance criteria covering monitoring, backup and restore, documentation, support models, security, access, capacity and disaster recovery. • Lead go-live readiness reviews and provide clear go/no-go recommendations based on production risk and supportability. • Coordinate knowledge transfer to Service Desk, Infrastructure and support teams, ensuring runbooks, known errors and escalation paths are complete. • Ensure new and changed services, infrastructure components, dependencies and ownership details are accurately recorded in the CMDB. Production Operations, Incident and Problem Management • Lead L2/L3 production escalations and major incident bridges across Product, Infrastructure, Security and vendors, maintaining timely stakeholder communications. • Facilitate post-incident reviews and robust root cause analysis, ensuring corrective and preventive actions are assigned, automated where possible and closed on time. • Identify recurring incidents and drive problem resolution across application code, infrastructure and operational processes. • Define and maintain clear L1, L2, Product, Infrastructure and vendor escalation paths for each service. • Release, Change and CI/CD Governance • Act as the primary link between Product release planning and Tech change management. • Ensure releases comply with change governance, including risk assessment, testing evidence, release gates, rollback plans, infrastructure impact and communications. • Coordinate release and maintenance windows, including dependencies such as patching, upgrades, certificates and capacity, and maintain a consolidated calendar. • Own the strategy and evolution of secure, reliable CI/CD and GitOps capabilities using tools such as Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions or ArgoCD. Reliability, Observability and Resilience • Maintain high availability for business-critical applications and infrastructure, with service objectives aligned to business needs and a target of 99.9% uptime where applicable. • Define and monitor service level objectives, service level indicators and error budgets for availability, response time, errors, jobs, databases and certificates. • Design end-to-end monitoring, telemetry and alerting using platforms such as Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, Azure Monitor, PRTG or AppDynamics. • Monitor capacity, performance and cost trends, raising risks before they become incidents and driving timely remediation. • Ensure backup, restore and disaster recovery tests are planned, executed and documented for critical services, with realistic RTO and RPO targets. Infrastructure as Code and Automation • Oversee the design, implementation and operation of secure, scalable hybrid and public cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, GCP or OpenShift. • Define reusable infrastructure-as-code patterns using Terraform, CloudFormation, AWS CDK or Ansible, promoting immutable, consistent and auditable environments. • Guide the implementation and operation of container platforms using Docker, Kubernetes, ECS or EKS, including service mesh, distributed tracing and certificate automation. • Create self-service automation paths for Product teams and reduce operational toil across deployments, health checks, alert handling and recurring support activities. • Identify opportunities to improve the quality, cost and speed of the software delivery lifecycle across cloud, application and quality engineering. Leadership, Governance and Continuous Improvemen t • Lead, develop and mentor DevOps and Systems engineers, including senior individual contributors, while fostering collaboration, inclusion, accountability and technical excellence. • Define and evolve engineering standards and best practices focused on automation, stability, security, reusability and adaptability. • Maintain clear RACIs between Product and Tech teams, including accountability for building, running, supporting and approving services. • Ensure runbooks, architecture diagrams, support documentation and operational records remain current and validated. • Produce regular service and team reporting covering availability, incidents, changes, open problems, risks, technical debt, delivery metrics and KPIs. • Bring operational feedback, security findings and reliability improvements into Product backlogs and support audit, compliance, security and data privacy requirements. • Manage team budgets and cloud expenditure, driving cost optimization and operational efficiency. YOUR PROFILE • 8+ years of experience in DevOps, Tech operations, application support, Site Reliability Engineering, systems engineering or technology architecture. • 4+ years of experience in a technical leadership or people management role, with demonstrated success leading operational improvement and transformation. • Bachelor's degree in a relevant discipline, or an equivalent combination of education and professional experience. • At least 5 years supporting enterprise cloud platforms, with strong hands-on experience in AWS and working knowledge of Azure, GCP or OpenShift. • Proven experience with production readiness, service transition, major incident coordination, problem management, release governance and change management. • Strong hands-on experience with infrastructure as code, containers, orchestration, CI/CD pipelines and Git-based workflows. • Practical knowledge of ITIL practices, ITSM and CMDB platforms such as ServiceNow, Jira Service Management or Jira Assets. Technical Knowledge • Cloud services and architecture, including services such as ELB/ALB, CloudFront, ECS, ECR, EKS, Lambda and Route 53. • Infrastructure automation and configuration management using Terraform, CloudFormation, AWS CDK, Ansible, Chef or Puppet. • Docker and Kubernetes-based platforms, including service mesh, distributed tracing and automated certificate management. • CI/CD and development tooling such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, SonarQube, Artifactory and ArgoCD. • Linux administration across Red Hat, CentOS or Ubuntu, together with a sound understanding of Windows servers, IIS, networks, certificates and SQL databases. • Proficiency in at least one scripting or programming language such as Python, Go, Bash or Groovy. • Monitoring, observability and application performance management using tools such as Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, AppDynamics, New Relic, PRTG or Azure Monitor. Leadership and Personal Attributes • Strong leadership, coaching and delegation skills, with the ability to build ownership and accountability across teams. • Excellent troubleshooting, analytical and problem-solving capability, with a strong sense of urgency for mission-critical issues. • Clear communication and influencing skills across technical, non-technical and senior stakeholders. • Ability to make evidence-based go/no-go decisions and say "not yet" when a service is not ready for production. • Structured, documentation-oriented and disciplined in following actions through to completion. • Calm and organized under pressure, with the ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced operational environment. WHAT WE OFFER: We are committed to supporting your development, advancing your career, and providing benefits that matter to you. Our industry-leading Alter Domus Academy offers six learning zones for every stage of your career, with resources tailored to your ambitions and resources from LinkedIn Learning. Our global benefits also include: • Support for professional accreditations • Flexible arrangements, generous holidays, plus an additional day off for your birthday! • Continuous mentoring along your career progression • Active sports, events and social committees across our offices • 24/7 support available from our Employee Assistance Program • The opportunity to invest in our growth and success through our Employee Share Plan • Plus additional local benefits depending on your location Salary Range: The base salary for this role is $ 130k to $180k annualized. We encourage all candidates to apply and discuss the overall package with the recruitment team. #LI-HYBRID #LI-TC1