Senior Director, Application Operations

Every day, Global Payments makes it possible for millions of people to move money between buyers and sellers using our payments solutions for credit, debit, prepaid and merchant services.  Our worldwide team helps over 3 million companies, more than 1,300 financial institutions and over 600 million cardholders grow with confidence and achieve amazing results.  We are driven by our passion for success and we are proud to deliver best-in-class payment technology and software solutions.  Join our dynamic team and make your mark on the payments technology landscape of tomorrow. 

Primary Objective/Purpose of the Job 

Leads multiple Application Operation Leaders and their teams of Application Support Specialists in the planning and execution of operational and project based deliverables to support Availability, Reliability, Security and Compliance of critical Transactions processing platforms in addition to on-going support needs of customers and other stakeholders of these platforms.

Responsibilities

• Develops the operational support strategy and model to meet the evolving needs of the business and customers for multiple mission critical applications

• Leads development of operational standards and practices to guide team members in the creation of robust and efficient processes and supporting tooling focusing on high quality outcomes for all customers

• Mentors Technical Team leaders to cultivate an environment of learning, continuous improvement and lean practice adoption focussed on scalable, reliable, automated operations or self-service enablement where appropriate

• Proactively develops the team and their career progression to ensure appropriate skill sets, toolsets and mindsets to drive transformative initiatives such as adoption of Site Reliability Engineering, furthering automated operations and introducing Operating Model or Organizational change

• Acts as a key stakeholder in requirements, design and implementation of new solutions or processes to ensure operational health and service to the team’s customers are constantly improved.

• Develops KPIs and target metrics for the Application Operations area providing insights which drive informed decisions to take actions that result in improved outcomes

• Works closely with peers in other functions to agree frameworks and practices that ensure strong alignment and high levels of collaboration exist between functions at all times

• Effectively communicates significant issues as they arise ensuring relevant stakeholders are kept informed

• Ensures a culture of constant learning, Improvement and Operational Excellence is fostered with implementation of appropriate mechanisms to achieve and measure.  

• Ensures security and compliance are integrated into all activities of the team per internal and industry standards the organization adheres to

• Develops framework for knowledge management across all Application Operations teams enabling team members to be highly effective and successful

Knowledge and Skill Required 

• Excellent knowledge of ITSM practices and tools in areas such as Incident management, change management, service transition, risk & problem management, disaster recovery 

• Strong process design skills with ability to see bigger picture to evolve support models and identify new or emerging support needs 

• Solid technical knowledge of the fundamentals of database, network and compute systems

• Very good familiarity with Service observability techniques, technologies and tools

• Familiarity with DevOps techniques and tools for Application testing, deployment and configuration management

• Strong in service desk process development and tooling

• Ability to quickly grasp the architecture of application services, those services technical dependencies and their business context

• Excellent communicator with ability to explain technical subject matter to both technical and non technical audience

• Practices sound judgment and decision making in a fast paced environment and in occasionally high pressure situations

• Ability to derive and evaluate meaningful success metrics and measure performance against them

• Strong critical thinking with excellent ability to prioritize

Experience 

• 12 years or more working in IT Operations roles with minimum 5 leading large and diverse team

• Extensive experience in developing policies, standards, frameworks and processes for Technical Operations teams supporting mission critical Production environments

• Experience of establishing