Production Operations Lead

Group 1001is a consumer-centric, technology-driven family of insurance companies on a mission to deliver outstanding value and operational performance by combining financial strength and stability with deep insurance expertise and a can-do culture. Group1001’s culture emphasizes the importance of collaboration, communication, core business focus, risk management, and striving for outcomes. This goal extends to how we hire and onboard our most valuable assets – our employees.Why This Role Matters:The Production Operations Lead is responsible for the day-to-day operational leadership of a Prod Ops squad supporting the stability, availability, and reliability of Group 1001's production systems. This role serves as the primary escalation point within the team, coordinating incident response across multiple engineering teams, facilitating problem management to root cause resolution, and ensuring change management processes are followed consistently. The Production Operations Lead guides and mentors Production Operations Analysts, ensuring effective triage, ticketing, escalation, and stakeholder communication during service-impacting events.The Production Operations Lead is accountable for operational outcomes: SLA adherence, notification cadence, shift handoff quality, and process compliance. This role bridges the gap between technical engineering teams and business stakeholders — translating incident impact into clear executive communication while keeping technical responders focused on resolution. An effective Production Operations Lead will demonstrate the ability to manage high-severity incident bridges, enforce escalation timelines, drive post-incident root cause analysis to completion, and build trust with cross-functional teams through consistent process execution.How You'll Contribute:The Production Operations Lead is expected to have deep familiarity with ITIL-aligned Incident, Problem, and Change Management processes in a highly SLA-driven environment. This role requires a solid understanding of monitoring and observability tools (Grafana, Datadog, CloudWatch, PagerDuty) with the ability to correlate alerts with potential service impacts and guide the team through rapid triage and escalation. The Production Operations Lead coordinates incident bridges for P0/P1/P2 events — facilitating the technical response, managing stakeholder notifications per defined cadence, and enforcing escalation SLAs (30-minute no-progress rule for P1, immediate executive notification for P0).Beyond incident response, this role owns the problem management lifecycle: creating problem tickets within 24–48 hours of incident resolution, facilitating Problem Review Board (PRB) meetings to produce root cause analysis documentation, coordinating After Action Reviews (AARs) within one week, and tracking corrective actions to closure through a 30-day monitoring period. The Production Operations Lead also represents Prod Ops at the Change Advisory Board (CAB), reviewing changes for risk, providing operability sign-off when changes affect monitoring or alerting, and ensuring customer-facing communication requirements are met.The Production Operations Lead works primarily during business hours but must be available for escalation during critical incidents and participates in on-call rotation as needed to support 24/7 operational coverage.Main Accountabilities: Serve as Incident Manager for P0/P1/P2 production incidents — spin up bridges, coordinate technical responders, enforce escalation timelines, and deliver stakeholder notifications per defined cadence Assign, prioritize, and oversee BAU (day-to-day) operational work across the squad — including access requests, runbook updates, monitoring tuning, and operational maintenance Guide and mentor Production Operations Analysts (Level I and II), ensuring effective triage, documentation, escalation, and communication during incidents Facilitate Problem Review Board (PRB) meetings within 48 hours of incident resolution and drive root cause analysis to completion Coordinate After Action Reviews (AARs) within one week of significant incidents, ensuring corrective actions are assigned with owners and due dates Identify recurring incident patterns and proactively create problem tickets when thresholds are met (3+ incidents, same system, within 30 days) Represent Prod Ops at the Change Advisory Board (CAB) — review changes for risk, validate implementation plans, and provide operability sign-off for changes affecting monitoring, alerting, or escalation paths Enforce customer-facing communication requirements (2 business day stakeholder notice after approval) and year-end freeze policies Ensure shift handoff quality — incoming shifts receive full context on active incidents, ongoing changes, and outstanding action items Maintain squad-level KPIs: incident response times, notification compliance, change success rate, and problem RCA completion within SLA Serve as the primary Prod Ops liaison for as