Director of Production Engineering & IT Support

This is a hands-on technical leadership role at the intersection of IT, SRE, and Product/Production Support. You will be the senior technical escalation point managing managers spanning multiple sub-functions (Service desk, IT & Product Support, Production Engineering). You will be obsessed with uptime. The job is to architect the monitoring, telemetry, and automation that lets us catch issues before users experience them; to run incidents when they happen; and to drive the postmortems and engineering partnerships that prevent the next one. You will also lead, mentor, grow managers and individual contributors, mature support processes end-to-end. This is not a service-delivery oversight role. You will spend time in dashboards, queries, and code, not in steering committees. You will be expected to write SQL, build monitors, review Terraform, and lead a P1 bridge personally.
This is an in-office-focused hybrid role based in Chicago.

• Own the incident response end-to-end. Serve as incident commander on high-impact P1/P2 incidents, lead communication, coordinate engineering and business stakeholders, run blameless postmortems, and drive resulting action items to closure.
• Architect and continuously refine the observability stack. Build and tune dashboards, alerts and synthetic monitoring that give real-time visibility into system and end-user experience health.
• Drive a shift from reactive to proactive. Identify what is breaking before it breaks. Use telemetry, anomaly detection, and trend analysis to surface systemic issues; partner with technical stakeholders to eliminate them at the source.
• Hit the operational metrics that matter. Ensure tight SLA adherence and continuous improvement across both end-user support and production incidents.

• Be the senior technical escalation. You will personally dig into logs, queries, and infrastructure to unblock the team when needed.
• Drive automation and self-service that eliminates repeat tickets and matures our knowledge management strategy.
• Implement AI and automated solutions to improve quality & speed of operations.

• Manage defects and enhancements, resolve incidents, and prevent systemic issues through structured Product management, Engineering and Operations partnership.
• Strengthen the feedback loop from support into the product roadmap. 
• Own and advance internal IT & Product support services (service desk, endpoint support, access management, etc).
• Foster a culture of accountability and ownership. Set the tone for technical excellence and user obsession across the org.

• 8+ years of experience leading distributed teams including managers in high-growth SaaS and API-first environments.
• Seasoned incident commander with hands-on experience leading P1/P2 response, running postmortems, and driving systemic fixes that prevent recurrence.
• Proven track record of reshaping support operations through AI, automation, and intelligent tooling.
• Strong technical proficiency such as but not limited to SQL, NQL, DDSQL, Powershell, Python, Terraform, Shell, Bash, Rest API.
• Solid understanding of AWS services including S3, CloudWatch, EKS, Kubernetes, ECS, EC2, Lambda, and Workspaces.
• Deep knowledge of support, DEX, observability and CRM platforms such as ServiceNow, Salesforce, DataDog, Nexthink.
• Excellent leadership & decision-making skills as well as project management experience with ability to execute across multiple priorities. 
• Exceptional communication skills with an ability to translate technical concepts into business value for executives and non-technical stakeholders.
• Familiarity with ITIL or similar frameworks with experience optimizing incident, change & problem management at scale.

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