Managing Director - Head of Technology Operations & Resiliency Services, Retirement & Insurance Solutions Technology

Key Duties and Responsibilities

• Operational Excellence: Own availability, performance, and resilience targets across all Retirement & Insurance production systems. Deliver measurable improvements in MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution), change success rates, and proactive issue detection.
• Vendor Ecosystem Orchestration: Govern and optimize a complex managed services portfolio ensuring accountability, cost efficiency, and service level achievement. Transform vendor relationships from transactional to strategic partnerships.
• SRE Transformation: Build the roadmap and capabilities to evolve from reactive TechOps to proactive Site Reliability Engineering practices—introducing observability, automation, error budgets, and engineering culture into operations.
• Business Continuity & Resilience: Ensure disaster recovery readiness, incident response excellence, and crisis leadership that protects TIAA's reputation and participant trust during high-stakes operational events.

This Head of Production Operations & Resiliency Services is accountable for the operational excellence, availability, and resilience of all Retirement & Insurance technology platforms serving millions of participants and managing hundreds of billions in assets. This role leads a complex ecosystem where approximately 70% of production operations are delivered through managed services partnerships, requiring exceptional vendor governance, operational discipline, and the ability to build high-performing hybrid operational models.

This leader will strengthen our operational foundation while simultaneously transforming toward Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices—balancing the immediate need for enterprise-grade stability with the strategic imperative to automate, instrument, and engineer reliability into our systems at scale. They will also lead operational readiness and production stability for a major core platform transformation while establishing the operational excellence framework that will define Retirement & Insurance technology for the next decade.

STRATEGIC ACCOUNTABILITY (WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE): 

• Operational Excellence: Own availability, performance, and resilience targets across all Retirement & Insurance production systems. Deliver measurable improvements in MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution), change success rates, and proactive issue detection.
• Vendor Ecosystem Orchestration: Govern and optimize a complex managed services portfolio ensuring accountability, cost efficiency, and service level achievement. Transform vendor relationships from transactional to strategic partnerships.
• SRE Transformation: Build the roadmap and capabilities to evolve from reactive TechOps to proactive Site Reliability Engineering practices—introducing observability, automation, error budgets, and engineering culture into operations.
• Business Continuity & Resilience: Ensure disaster recovery readiness, incident response excellence, and crisis leadership that protects TIAA's reputation and participant trust during high-stakes operational events.
• Platform Transformation Leadership: Serve as operational anchor for major platform migrations and technology modernization initiatives, ensuring production stability throughout complex transitions.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

Production Operations & Service Delivery (40%)

• Accountable for 24/7/365 production operations across Retirement & Insurance technology platforms including recordkeeping systems, participant portals, financial transaction processing, and business-critical applications
• Define and enforce Service Level Objectives (SLOs), availability targets, and operational KPIs aligned with business requirements and regulatory obligations
• Lead production change management processes ensuring disciplined risk assessment, rollback planning, and deployment coordination across development, infrastructure, and vendor teams
• Oversee capacity planning, performance optimization, and scalability management to support business growth and seasonal demand patterns
• Drive continuous improvement in operational metrics: uptime, MTTR, change success rates, proactive monitoring coverage, and automation maturity

• Partner closely with Infrastructure teams on compute, storage, network capacity planning, cloud migrations, and platform optimization initiatives to ensure production environments meet availability and performance targets
• Collaborate with Cybersecurity teams on security incident response, vulnerability remediation in production systems, security patching strategies, and e