Ralph Lauren Head of Digital & AI Production Operations

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

• Drive operational excellence across incident management, service reliability, and partner performance.
• Build a modern, scalable operating model emphasizing proactive detection, rapid resolution, and a strong culture of continuous learning.
• Manage vendor and partner relationships, ensuring accountability, transparency, and consistent delivery.
• Own strong budget discipline, managing costs and reinvesting savings back into transformation.
• Travel as needed, with specific frequency and key locations determined during the hiring process.

Experience, Skills & Knowledge

• Operational Leadership & Strategy: Lead a global, distributed ProdOps organization supporting online platforms, retail systems, and call center technologies. Connect operations to business objectives and technology strategy, with outcomes tied to customer experience, revenue impact, and measurable financial results. Build and sustain a 24x7 support model balancing automation, AIOps, and human expertise.
• AI-Driven Operations & Automation: Champion AIOps by identifying repeatable tasks and automating workflows to reduce operational overhead and improve service reliability. Leverage machine learning and predictive analytics for proactive alerting, incident prevention, and root cause analysis. Continuously assess team capacity and shift effort from reactive support to value-added initiatives.
• Incident & Problem Management: Establish and enforce a robust incident response framework including proactive alerting and monitoring, rapid triage and prioritization based on business impact, and end-to-end ownership from investigation to resolution. Refine escalation paths to ensure critical issues are addressed with urgency and accuracy. Lead post-incident reviews and release retrospectives to drive continuous improvement and learning.
• Partner, Vendor & Service Management: Define and manage vendor and partner SLAs, ensuring accountability, transparency, and consistent delivery. Establish clear service ownership models (e.g., RACI) across internal teams and external partners.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: Develop and maintain operational dashboards and KPIs, including system uptime and availability, incident resolution times, escalation trends, partner performance, and cost-to-serve. Use data insights to prioritize investments, optimize workflows, and improve service quality and financial outcomes.
• Global Team Leadership & Talent Development: Lead and develop managers and their teams across multiple regions. Drive talent reviews, succession planning, and capability building. Foster a culture of accountability, innovation, and continuous learning; upskill teams in modern practices including AI, automation, and advanced analytics.
• Continuous Improvement & Process Optimization: Identify and implement process improvements across ProdOps workflows to improve reliability, reduce toil, and increase operational leverage. Standardize best practices in incident management, release operations, and service delivery. Promote agile and DevOps-aligned ways of working across operations and engineering partners.