The Reliability Operations Specialist is responsible for driving operational excellence across incident management, service reliability, observability, and continuous improvement initiatives. This role serves as a central coordinator and subject matter expert for reliability practices, helping engineering teams improve service stability, reduce operational risk, and strengthen incident response processes.
The Reliability Operations Specialist partners closely with engineering, infrastructure, security, and operations teams to facilitate incident response, oversee post-incident reviews, track corrective actions, and provide visibility into the health and reliability of the platform. This role does not have direct people management responsibilities but influences reliability outcomes across the organization through process ownership, collaboration, and data-driven decision making.
Responsibilities
Incident Management & Operational Excellence
- Participate in major incident response activities and serve as an Incident Commander when assigned.
- Facilitate incident coordination, escalation, stakeholder communications, and status reporting during service-impacting events.
- Support ongoing improvement of incident management processes, procedures, and operational readiness.
- Drive initiatives focused on reducing Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR).
- Maintain and apply the Criticality Matrix to tier services, infrastructure, and customer MRR impact.
Post-Mortem Management & Corrective Actions
- Coordinate and facilitate post-mortem reviews following significant incidents.
- Ensure post-mortems are completed accurately, consistently, and within established timelines.
- Synthesize findings across incidents to identify trends, recurring issues, and systemic risks.
- Maintain accountability for corrective action tracking and closure.
- Promote a blameless culture of learning and continuous improvement and proactive/reactive problem management.
Reliability Strategy & Observability
- Partner with engineering teams to define and maintain Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) across our product lines and services.
- Support development and evolution of platform observability strategies, including monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and telemetry standards.
- Analyze reliability metrics and operational trends to identify improvement opportunities.
- Recommend and track initiatives that improve platform stability, resiliency, and service performance
- Partner with DevOps to design JSM workflows for Incident, Problem, and Change processes while eliminating manual meetings through automation.
Change Management & Governance
- Establish change policy, lifecycle rules, risk assessments, CAB oversight, and approvals across standard, normal, and emergency changes.
- Track and govern Change Failure Rates and change-related incidents to protect environment stability.
Service Transition & ITAM / Configuration Governance
- Embed across Product Line pods to manage service acceptance, operational readiness, support models, and lifecycle status (supported/unsupported/EOL).
- Maintain asset governance, CMDB accuracy, Configuration Items (CIs), and service relationship mapping in JSM.
Reporting & Stakeholder Communication
- Develop reliability reporting for engineering leadership and executive stakeholders.
- Maintain incident communication standards and stakeholder notification protocols.
- Provide regular reporting on reliability trends, corrective actions, incident performance, and service health.
- Translate technical reliability metrics into actionable business insights.
Qualifications
Required
- 3+ years of experience in Product Operations, Platform Operations, Technical Customer Support, Incident Coordination, or IT Service Management (ITSM/ITIL).
- Experience participating in or coordinating major incident response activities.
- Knowledge of incident management, root cause analysis, and post-mortem methodologies.
- Experience with monitoring, alerting, observability, or operational reporting tools.
- Strong analytical and organizational skills with attention to detail.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Ability to work effectively across multiple teams and influence outcomes without direct authority.
Preferred
- Experience working with SLOs, SLIs, and reliability metrics.
- Familiarity with cloud infrastructure, Linux systems, networking, or distributed platforms.
- Knowledge of ITIL, operational excellence, or reliability engineering principles.
- Experience supporting high-availability SaaS, hosting, cloud, or infrastructure environments.
- Experience creating executive-level operational reports and presentations.
About Nexcess
Nexcess provides specialty cloud solutions for organizations where performance and compliance have to coexist. We serve businesses worldwide, from agencies scaling client sites to enterprises running mission-critical operations. We've built our reputation on deep technical expertise and genuine partnership with every client we work with. Behind every environment we manage is a team of people who take the craft seriously and keep showing up when it matters.