Sr. Director, Production Operations (JAX, FL - Hybrid)

Job Description

Location: Jacksonville, FL Office (Hybrid)

Are you curious, motivated, and forward-thinking? At FIS you’ll have the opportunity to work on some of the most challenging and relevant issues in financial services and technology. Our talented people empower us, and we believe in being part of a team that is open, collaborative, entrepreneurial, passionate and above all fun.

About the role

You will lead a large, global production operations organization supporting Back Office technology platforms. This role owns the operational strategy, service reliability, production stability and continuous improvement agenda for critical production environments. Success is defined by measurable improvements in platform availability, incident prevention, operational readiness, support effectiveness, stakeholder confidence and client experience.

What you will be doing

• Lead and develop a large, global production operations organization across application support, service reliability, incident management, operational governance teams and service delivery teams.

• Own production stability, availability, performance, resiliency and service health for business-critical Back Office platforms using clear KPIs, SLAs/SLOs and outcome-based measures to drive accountability and continuous improvement.

• Provide calm, decisive leadership during high-severity incidents, client-impacting events and crisis situations, ensuring disciplined recovery and clear stakeholder communication.

• Drive disciplined root cause analysis, problem management and permanent corrective actions to reduce repeat incidents and operational risk and client disruption.

• Partner closely with product, technology, infrastructure, security, client support and business stakeholders to align production operations priorities with platform roadmaps, client commitments and business outcomes.

• Strengthen change governance, release risk management, rollback planning and disaster recovery practices to protect service continuity, automation, observability, monitoring and proactive alerting to improve service continuity and operational resilience.

• Modernize established support models and develop leadership talent, succession plans and a culture of accountability, collaboration, continuous improvement and client focus.

• Manage the production operations including capital needs for software, hardware, consulting services.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in technology operations, production support, infrastructure operations or a related discipline, including senior leadership of large-scale teams.

• Proven success supporting mission-critical platforms in financial services or another highly regulated technology environment.

• Demonstrated ability to lead 24x7 production operations, major incident response, service reliability and operational governance at scale.

• Track record of improving production stability, reducing operational risk and delivering measurable service management outcomes.

• Advanced stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence across product, technology, business, security and infrastructure teams.

• Strong understanding of incident, problem, change, release, disaster recovery and business continuity management practices.  Experience managing internal and client-facing escalations.

• Experience supporting modern application architectures, including APIs, middleware, batch processing, database platforms, containerized workloads, cloud-native services and high-volume transactional systems.

• Strong technical understanding of cloud operations and hybrid infrastructure, including AWS, Azure, container platforms, virtualized environments, network connectivity, load balancing, DNS, certificates, storage, backup, restore and disaster recovery capabilities.

• Experience with enterprise observability, monitoring, logging, alerting and AIOps capabilities, including tools such as Splunk, Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana, BigPanda or similar platforms.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leading operating model transformation, production support modernization and global follow-the-sun models.

• Familiarity with security, resiliency and operational control expectations in regulated environments, including vulnerability management, access controls, audit readiness, SOC controls and third-party platform oversight.

• Working knowledge of DevOps, SRE and automation practices, including CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, runbook automation, scripting, toil reduction, deployment automation and self-healing operational patterns.

Key skills and competencies

• Executive presence, sound judgment and clear communication during critical production events.