Lead Production Support Analyst

About the role

The Lead Production Support & Operations role is responsible for end-to-end production support management for a defined line of business (Individual Solutions and WFG) ensuring availability, stability, performance, and operational excellence for business-critical applications and services.

Responsibilities

• Operational & Production Support Leadership
  Lead day-to-day production support operations for Individual Solutions & WFG applications/services, ensuring high availability, performance, and stability.
  Act as the accountable owner for the production support operating model, including L1/L2/L3 routing, on-call rotations, escalation paths, and SLAs/SLOs.
  Own application onboarding into production support: ensure runbooks, SOPs, architecture diagrams, support metrics, monitoring/alerting, access, and DR/backup readiness are complete and current.

• Vendor Management & Service Delivery
  Manage vendor performance (tickets, SLAs, MTTR, quality of RCAs, repeat incidents, documentation hygiene) and drive continuous service improvement.
  Run recurring vendor governance: operational reviews, KPI scorecards, backlog prioritization, and corrective action plans.
  Coordinate with third-party providers for escalations, service requests, planned maintenance, patching, and production changes.

• Incident, Problem & Change Management
  Serve as the primary escalation point for high-severity incidents; lead war rooms/bridge calls and drive timely resolution with strong communication.
  Ensure Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and Post-Incident Reviews (PIRs) are completed with actionable remediation, prevention plans, and measurable follow-through.
  Drive problem management: identify patterns and recurring issues using incident history, logs, and metrics; reduce repeat incidents through permanent fixes.

• Continuous Improvement, Automation & Incident Reduction
  Proactively identify opportunities for automation (self-healing, auto-remediation, runbook automation, standardized scripts) that reduce toil and improve MTTR.
  Drive operational standardization: repeatable onboarding, consistent runbooks, automated checks, and common monitoring patterns.
  Lead initiatives focused on reducing incident volume, shortening recovery times, improving release quality, and removing manual steps from common procedures.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in production support, IT operations, cloud operations, or SRE/Platform operations, with 3+ years in a lead role (team lead, service owner, or vendor lead).

• Strong knowledge of ITSM/ITIL practices and hands-on experience with ServiceNow (Inc/Prob/Chg; Event Mgmt preferred).

• Demonstrated ability to lead high-severity incident response, drive cross-functional execution, and ensure disciplined RCA/PIR completion.

• Proven experience managing vendor/contractor teams, including performance management through KPIs, governance routines, and continuous improvement plans.

• Technical fluency across applications, infrastructure, cloud, and database layers, able to guide triage and validate solutions.

• Strong documentation skills: runbooks, SOPs, support models, escalation procedures, and operational readiness checklists.

• Excellent communication skills able to translate complex technical events into business impact and executive-ready updates.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting financial services/insurance applications and regulated environments (audit, evidence capture, change controls).

• Experience implementing automation (runbook automation, scripting, auto-remediation) and improving observability practices.

• Exposure to SLO/SLI definitions, reliability reporting, and operational scorecards.

• Experience with multi-sourced/global delivery models and coordinating across time zones.

• Bachelor’s degree in information technology, Computer Science, or related field (or equivalent experience); advanced degree a plus.