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

• 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.
• Oversee and coach a vendor/contractor support team, ensuring quality execution, clear accountability, and consistent outcomes across shifts/time zones.
• Own application onboarding into production support: ensure runbooks, SOPs, architecture diagrams, support metrics, monitoring/alerting, access, and DR/backup readiness are complete and current.
• Establish operational readiness standards across logging, monitoring, access controls, backup, disaster recovery, and maintenance windows.
• Manage vendor performance (tickets, SLAs, MTTR, quality of RCAs, repeat incidents, documentation hygiene) and drive continuous service improvement.
• Coordinate with third-party providers for escalations, service requests, planned maintenance, patching, and production changes.
• 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.
• Oversee change/release execution to minimize production risk: pre-change validation, approvals, rollback plans, post-release monitoring, and “go/no-go” decision support.
• Ensure adherence to ITSM processes and audit-ready evidence for incident/change/problem workflows.

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.