Description
Own the Operation. Drive the Response. Keep the Enterprise Running.
We are looking for an Operations Manager to lead the operational execution across a portfolio supported by 28 Digital Services Engineering teams. This position is responsible for ensuring enterprise systems and services remain available, reliable, secure, and operational while providing the leadership and coordination necessary to respond rapidly when priorities change or critical incidents occur.
What You'll Do
- Own operational performance across the Digital Services portfolio, maintaining visibility into the health, availability, reliability, and performance of enterprise systems and services supported by the 28 engineering teams.
- Drive rapid service restoration during outages and significant operational events by coordinating the appropriate engineering teams, removing obstacles, escalating when necessary, and ensuring issues are driven through resolution.
- Coordinate emerging priorities and critical initiatives, including Priority One incidents, urgent customer requirements, unexpected operational demands, and high-priority efforts that arise outside the normal planning cycle.
- Keep engineering teams focused on operational delivery by establishing priorities, identifying competing demands, resolving organizational obstacles, and ensuring teams have the information, resources, access, and support required to perform.
- Maintain operational and security readiness by ensuring compliance activities, audit requirements, documentation, evidence, remediation actions, and operational commitments remain current and ready when required.
- Serve as a senior escalation point for engineering teams, providing leadership and coordination when technical or operational situations require additional support, cross-team engagement, or executive visibility.
- Establish and maintain operational awareness through service health, performance, availability, incident, risk, and readiness reporting that gives engineering leadership a clear understanding of the environment.
- Drive continuous operational improvement by identifying recurring problems, service weaknesses, process gaps, and opportunities to improve reliability, response times, automation, and overall service performance.
What You'll Bring
- Experience leading or managing operations within a large-scale enterprise IT environment.
- Demonstrated experience overseeing the availability, performance, and operational delivery of multiple technology services or platforms.
- Experience coordinating multiple technical teams during incidents, outages, major changes, or high-priority initiatives.
- Strong understanding of enterprise IT operations, infrastructure, applications, cloud, networking, cybersecurity, end-user computing, or related technology disciplines.
- Demonstrated ability to prioritize competing operational demands and rapidly respond when critical requirements emerge.
- Strong leadership, communication, decision-making, and escalation management skills.
- Ability to work effectively with engineers, technical leads, managers, senior leadership, customers, and other stakeholders.
What makes this job so unique
Our programs bring together 28 different IT engineering disciplines supporting a complex enterprise technology portfolio.
The Operations Manager provides the leadership layer that connects those disciplines into a functioning operational organization.
Each engineering team has its own technical responsibilities, priorities, and expertise. Your responsibility is to ensure that those teams operate as one organization when the enterprise needs them to.
That means understanding what is happening across the environment, knowing which services are most critical, recognizing when priorities need to change, and bringing the right teams together quickly when something goes wrong.
The Operations Manager as the Escalation Point
When an engineering team encounters an issue that requires additional leadership, coordination, resources, or organizational support, the Operations Manager becomes a key escalation point.
You will help answer:
- Who needs to be involved?
- What is preventing the team from resolving this?
- What needs to happen right now?
- What resources or leadership support are required?
- What is the operational impact?
- Who needs to know?
- How do we get the service restored?
Operational Readiness
Operational excellence requires preparation before something goes wrong.
The Operations Manager will ensure engineering teams maintain the documentation, evidence, processes, controls, and operational readiness necessary to support security requirements, audits, assessments, service reviews, and other enterprise obligations.
When the Unexpected Happens
- Enterprise operations rarely follow a perfect schedule.
- A critical vulnerability emerges.
- A major service fails.
- A customer requirement changes.
- A Priority One initiative appears in the middle of the week.
- A major deployment needs immediate coordination.
- A system that worked yesterday suddenly doesn't work today.
The Operations Manager provides the organizational leadership necessary to shift gears without losing control of the larger portfolio.
What Success Looks Like
Success means the enterprise knows its services are operating,and when they aren't, the organization responds quickly and effectively.
It means:
- Critical services remain available and reliable.
- Operational issues are identified and addressed before they become larger problems.
- Priority One incidents receive immediate leadership and coordination.
- Engineering teams remain focused on their operational commitments.
- Security and audit requirements are continuously maintained and ready.
- Teams have the resources, access, information, and organizational support they need.
- Cross-team dependencies and operational risks are visible.
- Leadership has an accurate picture of service health and operational performance.
- Problems are driven to resolution rather than simply escalated.
- The organization continually becomes more predictable, resilient, and effective.
Most importantly, you take ownership of the operational outcome.
You don't simply ask whether someone is working the problem.
You ask:
- What is the problem?
- Who owns it?
- What is preventing resolution?
- What do they need?
- What is the operational impact?
- What is our next move?
- And when will the service be back?
What You'll Need to Succeed
- Education: Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Science or Equivalent experience
- Experience: 8+ years of related experience
- Security clearance level: TS/SCI w/Poly
- US citizenship required
- Role requirements:
- Ability to operate independently in a fast-paced environment and make sound decisions with incomplete or rapidly changing information.
- Strong understanding of operational risk, security compliance, audit readiness, and service management principles
- Certification: Must be 8520 compliant with a Security + Certification
- Location: Annapolis Junction, MD