Director of Platform Operations & Reliability

Xactus•Broomall, PA

1d•Remote

About The Position

The Director of Platform Operations & Reliability is a critical leadership role responsible for the health, stability, and continuous improvement of Xactus’ client-facing platforms. This leader owns four interconnected operational pillars: platform health and reliability, 3rd party technical integration relationships, incident management maturity, and observability and alerting advancement. Underpinning all three is a fourth responsibility: maintaining proactive awareness of third-party integration dependencies, ensuring that certificate expirations, credential rotations, IP changes, and endpoint updates are tracked, communicated, and acted upon before they cause disruption. The ideal candidate is operationally rigorous, automation-obsessed, and thrives in a high-velocity agile environment operating on two-week sprint cadences. Equally important is the ability to communicate the value of operational investments — translating monitoring capabilities, process improvements, and reliability work into business outcomes for Tech and Product leadership. This role manages an Incident Management Specialist and a Site Reliability Engineer, with the opportunity to grow the team over time.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or a related field; equivalent experience considered.
5+ years of experience in technology operations, incident management, SRE, or a related discipline.
Proven track record managing client-facing platform reliability and large-scale incident response.
Hands-on proficiency with Datadog (required) — dashboards, monitors, APM, log management, and alerting configuration.
Experience managing third-party integration dependencies, including certificate and credential lifecycle awareness.
Strong automation mindset; experience scripting or building operational tooling to eliminate manual processes.
Demonstrated ability to prioritize within a dense, competing operational and feature backlog while maintaining business alignment.
Exceptional communication skills — able to articulate the value of operational investments to non-technical product and business stakeholders.
Comfortable operating with urgency and clarity in a high-velocity, agile environment with two-week sprint cadences.
Candidates must be a resident of the United States, and should be authorized and eligible for employment in the United States.
Employment is contingent upon successful completion of required background checks (including but not limited to federal and state criminal history checks, employment history verification, education verification, credit history check) and pre-employment drug screening.

Nice To Haves

Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure) and cloud-native observability patterns.
Familiarity with incident management frameworks (ITIL, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, StatusPage, or similar).
Prior experience in a SaaS, fintech, or data-intensive technology company.
Experience with secrets management tooling (Keeper, HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or similar).
Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code or configuration management tooling (Terraform, Ansible, etc.).

Responsibilities

Own the operational health of all client-facing Xactus platforms — the primary lens through which this role operates.
Monitor platform performance, availability, and capacity; identify degradation trends before they become incidents.
Partner with Engineering and DevOps to drive improvements to system resiliency, deployment stability, and recovery capabilities.
Define and track SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for core platform services; report regularly to Tech and Product leadership.
Maintain and continuously improve runbooks, operational playbooks, and disaster recovery procedures.
Champion a culture of reliability and platform ownership across engineering teams.
Maintain proactive awareness of all third-party integration dependencies that support client-facing platform delivery.
Own a living inventory of integration touchpoints, including: TLS/SSL certificate expiration dates and renewal schedules, API credential rotation schedules and secrets hygiene, IP allowlist dependencies and endpoint change notifications, Partner-driven deprecations, version upgrades, or connectivity changes.
Ensure appropriate action is taken — and the right internal teams are engaged — whenever integration parameters change.
Serve as the escalation point with third-party partners during integration-related incidents or degradations.
Automate integration health checks, credential rotation reminders, and certificate expiry alerts wherever possible.
Own and continuously mature Xactus’ end-to-end incident management process — from detection through post-incident review.
Lead war-room coordination during major incidents; maintain composure, decisiveness, and clear stakeholder communication under pressure.
Define and enforce incident severity classifications, escalation paths, on-call rotations, and response SLAs.
Drive post-incident reviews and root cause analysis (RCA) with measurable corrective action follow-through.
Automate incident workflows: alert routing, on-call paging, runbook execution, and stakeholder notifications.
Produce regular incident trend reporting for engineering and product leadership; surface systemic reliability risks proactively.
Own the Xactus observability platform (Datadog and related tooling) — configuration, governance, and roadmap.
Lead the maturation of monitoring and alerting capabilities; identify coverage gaps and drive improvements through the sprint backlog.
Build and maintain platform health dashboards and automated reporting for engineering and executive audiences.
Advocate for observability investments with Tech and Product leadership — clearly communicating how new alerting and monitoring capabilities reduce business risk and improve MTTR.
Develop the ability to prioritize high-value monitoring capabilities within a competitive feature backlog, making and defending priority calls with limited shared resources.
Automate alerting tuning, noise reduction, and reporting pipelines to reduce manual toil and improve signal quality.
Embed observability best practices into the SDLC in partnership with DevOps and engineering teams.
Directly manage an Incident Management Specialist and a Site Reliability Engineer; provide mentorship, day-to-day leadership, and performance development.
Build a high-performing operations team culture with a strong bias toward automation, continuous improvement, and shared accountability.
Operate effectively within a two-week sprint cadence; own a prioritized backlog of operational capabilities and advocate for resourcing against a competitive feature backlog.
Communicate clearly and confidently across all organizational levels — from engineers to C-suite — translating operational complexity into clear, business-relevant narratives.
Partner with Engineering, Product, DevOps, and Security to align operational priorities with platform delivery goals.