Manager of IT Operations

Fetch•Reston, VA

About The Position

The Manager of IT Operations owns day-to-day operations management, SLA performance, and people leadership for the IT Operations team. This role closes the gap so the team gets focused coaching, prioritization, and operating rhythm, and so the Senior Director can stay focused on governance and cross-functional strategy instead of tactical operations escalations. This role inherits full people-management responsibility for the existing IT Operations engineers (the current IT Operations engineers, including offshore contractors).

Requirements

5+ years in IT operations, service delivery, or systems administration, with meaningful experience managing people.
Experience owning service desk or IT support operations, including SLA management.
Experience managing operational backlogs, incidents, and cross-functional escalations.
Strong coaching and performance-management skills; comfortable delivering direct, candid feedback.
Familiarity with identity/SaaS platforms (Okta, Google Workspace, Atlassian, Slack) sufficient to manage the people who administer them, without needing to be the deepest technical expert.
Excellent written and verbal communication across technical and non-technical audiences.
Both Mac / Windows experience

Nice To Haves

Prior experience building or scaling an IT operations team from an unstructured, generalist model into a specialized one.
ITIL-aligned incident/request/change management experience.
Experience with endpoint management, office technology, or hardware lifecycle programs.
Experience partnering with Security on identity and access governance.

Responsibilities

Conduct regular one-on-ones, set individual performance expectations, and deliver formal feedback, including performance improvement plans and disciplinary action when warranted.
Build a team operating rhythm: stand-ups, backlog reviews, incident reviews, and coverage planning.
Support the IT Operations Lead's technical and operational coordination work while retaining final accountability for personnel outcomes.
Own service-level performance for the ITDESK queue: time to first response, time to resolution, backlog age, and satisfaction.
Identify patterns behind missed targets and drive process, tooling, staffing, or documentation changes to correct them.
Ensure clean handoffs between frontline support, IT engineers, Security, People Experience, and other cross-functional partners.
Own the IT Operations backlog: prioritization, sequencing, and tradeoffs when demand exceeds capacity.
Track delivery of operational projects (SaaS rollouts/retirements, office technology changes, workflow automation) to completion.
Communicate delivery risk, resourcing constraints, and priority conflicts to the Senior Director before they become escalations.
Provide management oversight of endpoint/hardware lifecycle, identity and access provisioning/deprovisioning, and SaaS administration performed by the team.
Partner closely with the Sr. IT Engineer (IAM & Platform) on identity governance, entitlement reviews, and platform administration priorities.
Ensure onboarding/offboarding SLAs are met and exceptions are tracked and resolved.
Serve as the management escalation point for operational incidents that exceed the IT Operations Lead's authority or require cross-functional or vendor coordination.
Ensure recurring incidents receive root-cause analysis and are tracked to remediation.
Escalate security-relevant findings to the Director of Information Security promptly.
Own vendor relationship management for IT Operations-administered platforms (Okta, Google Workspace, Slack, Zoom, endpoint management tools, etc.).
Support contract renewal preparation with usage, cost, and risk data.
Drive license rightsizing and cost-control initiatives.
Partner with the Senior Director on sequencing and justifying future IT Operations hires (Service Desk Lead, Tools & Automation Engineer, additional platform engineers) as the team's target structure is built out.
Provide the Senior Director with regular visibility into service health, backlog risk, team capacity, and delivery commitments.
Prepare or contribute to recurring operational reporting (SLA performance, ticket trends, project status).
Represent IT Operations in cross-functional working sessions as delegated.