JOB DESCRIPTION

SaaS Operations Manager

This is a hands-on operations management role. You will be in the work daily — monitoring tickets, running incident responses, coaching your team, and driving the fixes that prevent the same problems from recurring. If you are looking for a purely strategic or people-leadership role, this is not it.

The Role

We are looking for an operations manager who is equally comfortable managing people and getting into the detail of a live incident. You will own the day-to-day operational performance of our SaaS support and data annotation teams — making sure customer issues get resolved on time, our business continuity processes are tight, and the recurring problems that slow us down get fixed for good.

This role sits at the center of our live operations. You are the person the team looks to when something goes wrong, and the person the business looks to for a stable, predictable support operation. You do not need to have all the answers — but you do need to know how to run an incident, manage a team under pressure, and follow through until the problem is closed.

What You Will Do

1. Team Management

• Directly manage the Application Support Specialists and the Data Annotation Team Leads. You are their day-to-day manager — setting expectations, running check-ins, coaching performance, and handling escalations from within the team.
• Conduct regular performance reviews and own the career development conversations for your direct reports.
• Own hiring for your team when headcount is approved. You run the process and make the recommendation.
• Build and maintain a culture where quality, accountability, and follow-through are the norm — not the exception.

1. Incident Response — Hands-On

• You are the incident manager for all application-level issues during your shift. When a P0 or P1 hits, you declare the incident, assemble the response, and run the call until it is resolved. This is not a role you delegate — you are in it.
• Monitor the support queue and alerts continuously. Triage incoming tickets using the priority framework. Know the difference between a P0 that needs you on a call right now and a P2 that can be handled by the team.
• Coordinate with Application Development, DevOps (Jester), and the Platform team during incidents. You own the application layer; you pull in the right people for infrastructure and platform issues.
• After every significant incident, you run the post-mortem: what happened, why it happened, and what specifically is being done to prevent it from happening again. You assign follow-up actions and track them to completion.

1. Business Continuity

• Own the Data Annotation team’s manual fallback process. When automation fails, your team manually books cases. This is non-negotiable — 100% daily case clearance, every day.
• Ensure the manual fallback process is always trained, documented, and ready to execute. It should never be the case that the team does not know what to do when automation goes down.

1. Operational Improvement

• Track recurring incidents. If the same type of issue is appearing repeatedly, you build the business case for a fix and bring it to the Application Development team with a clear problem statement and priority.
• Be the voice of your teams in cross-functional conversations. Surface their pain points clearly and translate them into actionable problem statements — not complaints.

1. Cross-Functional Communication

• During incidents, keep the Customer Success team informed with timely, accurate status updates. They manage the customer relationship — you give them the information they need to do that well.
• At the end of each shift, produce a concise handoff summary for the incoming daytime team. No important context should be lost between shifts.

What We Are Looking For

Must-Haves

• 2–5 years of experience in an operations, application support, or IT service management role where you personally owned incident triage and resolution — not just supervised others doing it.
• Experience managing a small team (3–10 people) directly: setting expectations, running performance conversations, coaching under pressure.
• Comfortable working in a 24/7 or shift-based SaaS environment. You understand what it means to hand off a live environment to another shift and receive one.
• Hands-on familiarity with ITSM principles: incident prioritization (P0–P3), SLA management, post-mortem methodology, root cause analysis.
• Clear, direct communicator. During an incident, you can give a concise status update to a Customer Success manager without jargon or confusion.

Strong Advantages

• Experience in a SaaS product support environment (not just IT helpdesk or infrastructure support).
• Familiarity with Jira or similar ticketing systems for managing support queues and incident tracking.
• Experience working in a cross-timezone team with Manila–Canada or similar split operations.
• ITIL Foundation certification or equivalent practical knowledge.

Not a Fit If

• Your experience is primarily in vendor management, account management, or project management without direct ownership of a live support operation.
• You have managed operations at a senior or director level and are looking for a primarily strategic role. This role requires daily hands-on involvement in the work.
• You have not personally run an incident response — meaning you were the person on the call, making decisions, coordinating the team, and communicating status.

How Success Is Measured

The right person for this role finds satisfaction in a clean queue, a well-run incident, and a team that knows exactly what to do when things go wrong. That is what success looks like here.