Senior Manager, Customer Experience

Job Description

As the Senior Manager, Customer Experience (Cloud Operations), you will serve as a critical operational pillar within QAD’s global Cloud Operations organization, reporting directly to the Senior Director of Cloud Operations. In this high-visibility leadership role, you will bridge strategic cloud direction with world-class operational delivery.

You will lead QAD’s IT Service Management (ITSM) framework, own major incident and problem resolution lifecycle, drive change management, and serve as the primary operational QAD interface for our outsourced Managed Service Provider (MSP) partner. Your core mission is to ensure secure, highly available, and performant AWS cloud infrastructure that delivers an exceptional, seamless customer experience for QAD's enterprise SaaS clients.

Role Division & Core Focus Areas

60% — IT Service Management & Governance | | (Incident & Problem Management, SLA Enforcement, MSP Governance)

40% — AWS Cloud Ops, FinOps & Release | | (AWS Infrastructure, Change Advisory, Release Management)

Key Responsibilities

1. Incident & Problem Management Leadership

• Major Incident Command: Own the end-to-end lifecycle for P0, P1, and P2 incidents. Serve as the incident commander leading war room discussions, managing real-time bridge calls, establishing stakeholder communication discipline, and driving swift resolution.

• Root Cause Analysis (RCA) & Quality: Oversee rigorous RCA documentation and track permanent fixes to completion to eliminate repeat failures across complex cloud environments.

• Incident Protocol Enforcement: Maintain war room discipline, enforce post-incident review SLAs, and ensure compliance with P0 real-time handling protocols.

2. Service Delivery & SLA Governance

• SLA Performance: Own weekly SLA breach analyses and strictly enforce Response and Resolution SLA tiers (P0–P3) across both internal teams and vendor partners.

• Queue & Ticket Hygiene: Drive daily ticket health reviews, enforce priority accuracy, eliminate stalled tickets (, "waiting on customer" discipline), and manage inactive P1/P2 queues.

• Executive Reporting: Deliver weekly operational SLA trend analysis and performance metrics to the Senior Director of Cloud Operations.

3. MSP & Outsourced Partner Governance

• Primary Partner Interface: Act as QAD’s daily operational interface for our outsourced managed services partner, collaborating directly with their Principal Engineering Manager level.

• Scope & SLA Governance: Oversee Statement of Work (SOW) compliance, chair regular scope reviews, and strictly prevent out-of-scope creep in both directions. Hold the MSP accountable to contractual SLAs via weekly BAU tracker reviews.

• Formal Reviews & RACI: Lead monthly formal service reviews and mandate actionable, written improvement plans for any SLA breaches. Maintain and enforce incident/change RACI matrices across QAD and MSP teams.

• Cutover & Release Alignment: Oversee pre-UAT and production cutover handovers with clear RACI framework execution, staffing confirmations, and standardized communication templates.

4. Change Advisory & Cloud Release Management

• CAB Leadership: Chair the Change Advisory Board (CAB) process, ensuring all high-risk changes feature detailed rollback plans and clear go/no-go criteria.

• Release Coordination: Maintain the global change calendar, coordinating seamlessly between cloud migrations, monthly patch releases, and MSP deployments.

Qualifications

Qualifications & Experience

Must-Have Requirements

• Experience: 12+ years of total experience in Cloud/IT Operations, with 5+ years specifically in ITSM or Service Delivery leadership roles.
• Incident Leadership: Proven track record in P0/P1 major incident command at enterprise scale.
• ITSM Mastery: Deep expertise in ITIL framework—specifically Incident, Problem, Change, SLA, and Supplier Management.
• Vendor/MSP Governance: Hands-on experience governing third-party MSPs or outsourced service partners (scope management, contractual SLAs, performance reviews).
• Cross-Team RACI: Experience establishing and enforcing live incident/change RACI frameworks across combined internal and vendor teams.
• People Leadership & Hours: 3+ years of direct people management experience. Flexibility to work overlapping US East / EMEA business hours (approx. 2:00 PM – 11:00 PM IST) from Pune.
• Technical Depth: Solid experience with SaaS-hosted infrastructure, Linux/Windows server administration, and AWS cloud operations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Certifications: ITIL v4 Foundation or Managing Professional; AWS Certified SysOps Administrator or Cloud Practitioner; FinOps Certified Practitioner (FinOps Foundation).
• Tools: Hands-on working knowledge of enterprise ITSM platforms like ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, or Zendesk.
• Domain Knowledge: Background in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) SaaS hosting or manufacturing software environments.
• Vendor Background: Direct experience managing tier-1 Indian IT services delivery partners (, Persistent, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, or similar).
• AWS Expertise: Hands-on working knowledge of core AWS services (EC2, EBS, VPC, IAM, S3, RDS, Security Groups, VPN, CloudWatch).

Additional Information

• Your health and well being are important to us at QAD. We provide programs that help you strike a healthy work-life balance.
• Opportunity to join a growing business, launching into its next phase of expansion and transformation.
• Collaborative culture of smart and hard-working people who support one another to get the job done.
• An atmosphere of growth and opportunity, where idea-sharing is always prioritized over level or hierarchy.
• Compensation packages based on experience and desired skill set