Production Operations Manager

Description Lead production operations and Tier 3 support for AT&T’s Flagship app and associated backend platforms, delivering business-critical capabilities to millions of customers. Combine team leadership with hands-on technical expertise and accountability for production reliability, incident management, release readiness, and supportability. Investigate complex production issues, propose code fixes, and build operational dashboards and tools. Drive the evolution of the operating model through AI adoption, automation, proactive issue prevention, and measurable improvements in customer experience and operational efficiency. Key Responsibilities • Lead and develop the Tier 3 Operations team responsible for production support, operational governance, and incident management in a 24x7 environment. • Manage production deployments, feature flag releases, configuration changes, and launch readiness activities, with clear release criteria and rollback plans. • Ensure service reliability, operational stability, monitoring, and supportability across mobile and backend platforms. Define and track service-level objectives tied to critical customer journeys. • Lead major incident response and make timely operational decisions, including rollout suspension, rollback, feature flag deactivation, and escalation within agreed decision authority. • Conduct and lead hands-on technical investigations across mobile and backend systems. Analyze code, logs, traces, and system dependencies to identify root causes and propose actionable bug fixes to Engineering, including specific code changes where appropriate. • Partner with developers to validate fixes, drive permanent resolution of recurring issues, and track corrective actions through completion. Incorporate lessons learned into engineering and operational practices. • Design, build, and maintain operational dashboards, queries, scripts, diagnostic tools, and automation that provide visibility into service health, customer journey performance, and production issues. • Establish proactive monitoring and early detection capabilities to identify service degradation and operational risks before they cause significant customer impact. • Define and execute an AI and automation roadmap covering incident analysis, alert correlation, runbook execution, and recovery workflows, with measurable improvements in response time and operational efficiency. • Reduce repetitive manual work and improve operational scalability through automation, self-service capabilities, and process optimization. • Partner with Product, Engineering, QA, DevOps, and SRE to integrate operational requirements throughout the delivery lifecycle and establish clear responsibilities across teams. • Provide operational visibility, reporting, risk management, and clear executive communications for critical initiatives and production activities. • Develop the team’s technical capabilities, embed AI into daily work, and lead changes in skills, practices, and ways of working. job that is used for creating requisitions 'from scratch' Requirements • 8+ years of experience in Production Operations, Application Support, Site Reliability Engineering, DevOps, or Release Management. • 5+ years of leadership experience managing technical operations or production support teams. • Experience supporting large-scale, customer-facing digital platforms in a 24x7 production environment. • Demonstrated hands-on technical depth in reading and debugging application code, analyzing logs and distributed traces, troubleshooting APIs and microservices, and identifying code-level defects. • Ability to translate technical investigations into concrete recommendations for code fixes and work effectively with Engineering to validate and implement them. • Practical experience using SQL, scripting, and observability tools to build dashboards, diagnostic capabilities, and operational automation. • Strong expertise in incident management, release management, deployment processes, monitoring, observability, and operational governance. • Experience working with Agile delivery teams, CI/CD pipelines, cloud-native applications, and microservices architectures. • Demonstrated ability to implement AI and automation in technical workflows and translate adoption into measurable operational improvements. • Experience implementing AI-assisted diagnostics and operational intelligence solutions at scale. • Proven success leading cross-functional initiatives, improving reliability, and transforming operational practices, supported by specific examples and measurable results. • Strong leadership, communication, stakeholder management, and problem-solving skills, with the ability to develop talent and lead organizational change. • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field. Preferred Qualifications • Experience supporting large-scale mobile applications across iOS and Android. • Telecommunications, digital commerce, or enterprise-scale consumer platform experience. • Strong knowledge of SRE principles, reliability engineering, and modern observability platforms. Success Measures • Production stability, service availability, and achievement of service-level objectives. • Reliability and successful completion of critical customer journeys, with reduced customer impact from production issues. • Deployment and launch success rates, including reduction in change-related incidents. • Faster incident detection and recovery, measured through mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to restore service (MTTR). • Reduction in recurring incidents and timely completion of permanent corrective actions. • Operational readiness for major business initiatives. • Measurable reductions in manual work and improvements in efficiency through AI and automation. • Effectiveness and adoption of operational dashboards, diagnostic tools, and self-service capabilities. • Team engagement, technical growth, AI proficiency, and organizational effectiveness. *We are hiring for various positions within the company, with some roles offered through outsourcing. Join us and enjoy a dynamic and flexible work environment.