Production Support Manager

New York Life Insurance•Overland Park, KS

15h•Hybrid

About The Position

As the Production Support Manager within IL Technology Operations at New York Life Insurance Company, you will lead a small, high-impact team responsible for keeping production systems healthy, observable, and resilient. This is a proactive, prevention-focused leadership role — your primary mission is to build monitoring frameworks, automate early warning systems, and implement preventive strategies that stop production issues before they impact the business. You will balance day-to-day operational excellence with forward-looking strategic initiatives, including platform modernization and the adoption of new technologies such as Amazon QuickSight. The ideal candidate is a hands-on technical leader with a high sense of urgency, a builder’s mindset, and a deep commitment to both their team and the reliability of the systems they own.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in production support, site reliability engineering (SRE), or technology operations, with a demonstrated focus on proactive monitoring and incident prevention.
2+ years of people leadership experience with a proven ability to develop team members, drive accountability, and lead through both strategic initiatives and high-urgency production situations.
Hands-on experience with AWS cloud services (EC2, CloudWatch, Lambda, S3, RDS, etc.) and experience designing or implementing monitoring and alerting frameworks that enable proactive detection and prevention of production issues.
Experience with DevOps practices including CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and automated deployment processes that reduce manual effort and production risk.
Proven ability to develop and execute operational strategies, establish SLAs, and communicate meaningful metrics and system health dashboards to business stakeholders.
Experience supporting or decommissioning legacy systems (e.g., Microsoft Access, on-premises databases), including dependency mapping, migration planning, and risk management.
Serves as the on-call escalation point for production support issues during the overnight cycle run, providing leadership guidance and decision-making support to the offshore team when critical incidents require management-level intervention.

Nice To Haves

AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator, or DevOps Engineer).
Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools such as CloudWatch, Datadog, Splunk, Grafana, or PagerDuty — with a focus on configuring proactive alerting and trend-based anomaly detection.
Proficiency in scripting and automation languages (Python, PowerShell, Bash) used to build preventive automation, runbooks, or self-healing workflows.
Experience with business intelligence or analytics platforms (e.g., Amazon QuickSight, Tableau) for operational reporting and health dashboards.
Background in insurance or financial services technology operations, with familiarity driving enterprise-level technology transformation initiatives.

Responsibilities

Build and continuously evolve a proactive monitoring and alerting framework — designing early warning systems, automated health checks, and trend-based detection that identify and resolve potential production risks before they escalate into system downtime or customer-facing incidents.
Lead and develop a high-performing onshore production support team (including a Production Support Analyst and Lead), while coordinating offshore resources to ensure 24/7 coverage, consistent quality standards, and a culture rooted in prevention-first thinking.
Drive platform modernization initiatives, including the strategic decommissioning of legacy Microsoft Access databases and implementation of CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and automated deployment processes that reduce manual toil and production risk.
Develop and communicate operational health metrics, SLA dashboards, and incident trend reports to business stakeholders — delivering transparent, timely insights into production health, preventive actions taken, and continuous improvement outcomes.
Serve as the escalation point and strategic owner for critical production incidents — rapidly triaging issues, coordinating resolution across teams, and conducting post-incident reviews that drive systemic, preventive improvements.