Lead Production Support Analyst

Job Description

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.
• 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.

• 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.
• 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.

• Monitoring, Observability & Reliability

• Improve detection and response through dashboards, health checks, distributed tracing/APM, synthetic monitoring, and log correlation.
• Tune alerting to reduce noise and improve signal-to-noise; implement event correlation to prevent alert storms.
• Partner with engineering and platform teams to define/track error (where applicable), and reliability improvements.

• 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.

• Technical Environment:

• Cloud Platforms
• AWS: EC2, Lambda, ECS/EKS, S3, Cloud Front, Route 53, IAM, Cloud Watch, API Gateway, Secrets Manager
• Azure:
  Virtual Machines, Azure Functions, App Service, AKS, Entra , Azure Monitor/Log Analytics, Key Vault, API Management, Azure Backup

• Monitoring & Observability
• App Dynamics, Splunk, Prometheus, ELK, Cloud Watch, Azure Monitor, Grafana

• Incident & Event Management
• Service Now (Incident/Problem/Change/Event), Big Panda, JIRA

• Infrastructure, Middleware & Platforms
• Linux/Windows Server fundamentals; networking basics (DNS, routing, LB, firewall rules)
• Middleware/servers (as applicable): NGINX/Apache, Tomcat/Web Logic/JBoss, Kafka/MQ patterns

• CI/CD & Scheduling
• Jenkins/Git Hub Actions/Cloud pipelines (where applicable)
• Control-M/Cron/Airflow (where applicable)

• Security & Access
• IAM/role-based access, certificates, secrets management, key vaults

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 Service Now (Inc/Prob/Chg; Event Mgmt preferred).
• Demonstrated ability to lead…