Senior Director, Service Delivery and Quality

SoundThinking, Inc.•New York, NY

7d•$190,000 - $210,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Director, Service Delivery & Quality is the senior leader accountable for how our delivery organization serves its largest public-safety customer — owning service quality, release governance, problem management, and the teams that deliver them: QA, support, release/program management, and business analysis.

Requirements

Director-level (or equivalent) experience in service delivery, service management, or delivery operations within a complex, mission-critical, multi-stakeholder environment
Experience running service governance within a modern CI/CD delivery model — automated gates, pipeline-generated evidence, trunk/train release models — and fluency in DORA metrics alongside ITIL measures
Demonstrated experience building functions from scratch or near-scratch — not only running established ones
Deep expertise in incident, problem, and change management, with the credibility to lead their adoption in an organization that has never had them
Line-management experience across mixed functions (QA, support, PM/BA)
Executive stakeholder capability — presence, communication, and judgment to operate credibly with senior client leadership
Strong analytical capability — able to build a metrics program where none exists and use it to drive decisions
A writing-first operating style: documented decisions, written status, artifacts over meetings
Prior experience with AI, or readiness to learn and utilize AI tools for job-related tasks

Nice To Haves

Public-sector or public-safety client experience
Experience in managed service environments with direct client accountability
Experience during a legacy modernization or platform consolidation program (governing quality through a migration)
Proficiency with ServiceNow, Jira, TestRail, and executive reporting tooling

Responsibilities

Directly manage and develop the QA, support, release/program management, and business analysis functions
Build the QA function from its current two-analyst state into an automation-first quality practice covering a ~20-application mission-critical portfolio
Grow the support function from help-desk operations into a structured incident and problem management practice
Develop the BA team toward embedded product ownership within application teams
Build functions that run on documented process
Govern the published release train — the single Forward Schedule of Change shared with the client — operated day-to-day by a release conductor role on the Senior Director’s team
Own release gate policy, working with engineering/platform teams to ensure enforcement is automated in the delivery pipeline.
Build and own the end-to-end problem management practice: formal Problem Records for every Priority 1 and Major Incident (timeline, multi-layer causation, corrective actions with owners and deadlines, prevention plan, verified closure)
Deliver Root Cause Analysis reports within 5 business days of incident resolution, shared transparently with client leadership
Enforce 30-day closure verification before problem records close
Establish and own the Known Error Database (KEDB)
Define incident communication protocols with structured escalation paths
Chair the Monthly Stability Review with client leadership; lead the Quarterly Executive Briefing jointly with account leadership
Define and own the QA governance framework: testing standards, validation coverage requirements, and defect management — weighted by service criticality tier
Champion automation-first quality: characterization tests, contract tests, and pipeline-integrated validation as the primary quality mechanism, with structured manual testing where automation doesn’t reach
Own defect management governance — triage, prioritization, SLA-aligned resolution, and shared client visibility through common tooling
Jointly establish validation coverage targets with client stakeholders and hold delivery teams accountable to them
Own the organization’s delivery and service metrics program: DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, time to restore) alongside ITSM measures (incident recurrence, RCA timeliness, escape rate)
Lead the joint definition, baselining, and agreement of program KPIs with client leadership — building the instrumentation where no baseline exists today
Establish written-by-default reporting: dashboards and written status artifacts as byproducts of the work, replacing status meetings
Own the client-facing reporting dashboard
Maintain the Service Risk Register as a living document, reviewed jointly with client stakeholders
Govern the service prioritization/tiering exercise with client leadership (Tier 1 Mission Critical / Tier 2 Operationally Important / Tier 3 Supporting) that sequences QA coverage and release scrutiny
Track and report modernization and remediation progress at executive level; chair quarterly service risk reviews
Govern adoption of shared ITSM tooling (ServiceNow↔Jira integration) providing the client real-time visibility into incidents, problems, changes, and defects
Serve as the single point of accountability for service quality — the escalation point for unresolved quality or stability issues
Build trusted relationships with client operational and executive leadership, internal delivery teams, and the engineering and platform leaders alongside whom this role operates as a peer
Produce and present executive reporting at the monthly and quarterly governance cadence