Context
About the Role
Opportunity with a US Insurance Tech company (TPA)
Job Summary: We are seeking a dynamic and experienced professional to lead our Production Management function. This role will oversee application engineering, production support, and incident/problem management, while ensuring smooth operations across business-critical applications. The ideal candidate should have strong technical expertise, strategic thinking, solutioning capability, and a collaborative approach to work with cross-functional teams and global stakeholders.
End-to-End Production Ownership: Own and manage the production environment of enterprise applications with a focus on stability, performance, and scalability.
Application Engineering Oversight: Collaborate with engineering teams to ensure high availability and reliability of applications. Drive continuous improvement, automation, and performance tuning.
Production Support & Incident Management: Lead 24x7 production support operations. Define SLAs, drive root cause analysis (RCA), and ensure timely resolution of issues with minimal business disruption.
Solutioning & Technical Leadership: Provide direction on technical solutions, architecture decisions, and process improvements. Evaluate and implement tools to enhance monitoring, alerting, and response mechanisms.
Stakeholder Management: Build strong relationships with internal business units, clients, and external partners. Act as the single point of contact for production-related issues and communications.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with product managers, developers, QA, infrastructure, security, and compliance teams to align on priorities and ensure production readiness.
Risk & Compliance: Ensure production environments adhere to all compliance, audit, and security standards. Mitigate operational risks through proactive monitoring and controls.
Team Leadership: Manage and mentor a high-performing team of production engineers and support analysts. Foster a culture of accountability, agility, and continuous learning.
Requirements
Qualifications & Skills:
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
15+ years of experience in IT, with 5+ years in a leadership role in production/application support
Proven experience in managing large-scale, business-critical applications in a complex IT environment
Strong problem-solving, crisis management, and decision-making skills
Deep understanding of ITIL framework, DevOps principles, and SRE best practices
Excellent interpersonal and stakeholder management skills
Experience with monitoring tools (e.g., Splunk, AppDynamics, Dynatrace), cloud environments (AWS/Azure), and automation (CI/CD pipelines)
Strong verbal and written communication skills
Preferred Certifications:
ITIL v4 Foundation / Intermediate
PMP / Prince2 (optional but advantageous)
Cloud certifications (AWS/GCP/Azure Architect or DevOps)