SRE Lead / Production Support Manager

Job Title

SRE Lead / Production Support Manager

Location

Vienna, VA | Hybrid (3 days onsite)

Employment Type

Contract

Duration

6-12 months

Pay

$73/hr

About

VLink, founded in 2006, is a leading global provider of software engineering services with next-gen technologies and best-in-class talent. Our Headquarters are in the U.S, and we have offices in 7+ countries from North America-Europe to APAC, with expansion plans in the Middle East. With over 1,000 employees working globally, VLink has helped SMBs, and large enterprises achieve their business goals, and gained the trust of Fortune-250 companies. VLink is 'Great Place to Work® CertifiedTM' and has been a consistent winner as- Best Places to Work in CT. Trust, collaboration, and accountability are the three elements that are at the core of VLink's work culture. We value our professionals, providing comprehensive benefits and the opportunity for growth.

Job Description

This role offers the opportunity to combine hands-on operational leadership with meaningful transformation work. You will strengthen the team's processes and capabilities, introduce Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, and help build a practical path toward AIOps and self-healing operations. You'll work with technical and business partners to turn operational challenges into measurable improvements, while coaching a team focused on dependable service and continuous learning.

Responsibilities

• Lead the evolution of a critical production support organization. As Production Support Manager, you will guide an experienced L2/L3 team while shaping how the team improves service reliability, responds to incidents, and prevents recurring issues.
• Lead and develop L2/L3 production support staff, setting clear responsibilities, performance expectations, and development goals.
• Manage daily support operations, including incident response, escalations, service restoration, and coordination across technical teams.
• Establish and improve production support processes, including incident, problem, change, knowledge, and service-level management.
• Analyze incidents and operational trends to identify recurring issues, reduce repeat failures, and prioritize preventive actions.
• Assess the current production support model and define a phased roadmap for adopting SRE practices.
• Introduce SRE disciplines such as service-level indicators and objectives, error budgets, operational readiness, blameless reviews, and reliability engineering.
• Partner with application, infrastructure, cloud, security, and business teams to improve service reliability and operational outcomes.
• Identify opportunities to automate repetitive work, improve monitoring and observability, and reduce manual intervention.
• Guide the responsible adoption of AIOps capabilities, including event correlation, anomaly detection, and automated response.
• Develop and oversee a progression toward self-healing operations, with appropriate safeguards, testing, and human oversight.
• Define and report meaningful operational measures, such as service availability, incident trends, recovery time, repeat incidents, and automation outcomes.
• Build and maintain runbooks, support documentation, knowledge articles, and operational procedures.
• Communicate service health, major incidents, risks, progress, and improvement plans clearly to technical teams and leadership.
• Promote a culture of accountability, collaboration, continuous improvement, and learning from operational events.

Required qualifications to be successful in this role

• 8+ years of experience in application production support, IT operations, or service reliability, including leadership of L2/L3 support teams.
• Demonstrated experience managing major incidents, escalations, service restoration, root-cause analysis, and problem management in a production environment.
• Experience establishing or improving support processes, operational procedures, runbooks, knowledge management, and service-level reporting.
• Hands-on experience applying SRE practices, such as service-level indicators and objectives, reliability measurement, blameless incident reviews, and reducing recurring incidents.
• Experience assessing a traditional production support organization and leading its transition toward a more proactive, reliability-focused operating model.
• Experience identifying and delivering automation opportunities that reduce manual effort, improve response times, or prevent incidents.
• Working knowledge of monitoring, observability, alerting, and event-management practices across application and infrastructure environments.
• Experience partnering with application development, infrastructure, cloud, security, and business teams to resolve production issues and improve service reliability.
• Ability to use operational data and trends to prioritize improvement work and communicate risks, progress, and outcomes to technical and business stakeholders.
• Strong people leadership, coaching, communication, decision-making, and continuous-improvement skills.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Employment Practices

VLink is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive environment where diversity is celebrated. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or veteran status. Employment is contingent upon successful completion of a background check.

This job application process may use AI-powered tools to assist in screening and evaluating applications based on objective, job-related qualifications. AI is used solely to support the recruitment process and all final hiring decisions are made exclusively by our human recruitment team.

Applicant information will be handled in accordance with VLink's privacy policy.