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Orient, Illinois, United States
Onsite
To be considered for this position, applications and resumes are accepted only through our careers site by directly applying to the posted job. We do not accept unsolicited resumes or sales solicitations from staffing agencies. Any OCC employee wishing to submit a referral must do so through their Workday account. Any resume submitted outside of an active job posting will not be considered for employment.
What You'll Do:
The Manager, Environment Operations (EnvOps) will lead and optimize the L1 and L2 support functions responsible for full production-level environment support across application deployments, middleware, and platform infrastructure. This role drives incident response quality, implements SLA governance, leads alert reduction and MTTR improvement initiatives, and delivers actionable operational metrics to leadership. The Manager ensures the team operates at a high standard of readiness — triaging, resolving, and escalating environment issues with speed, accuracy, and full documentation discipline.
Primary Duties and Responsibilities:
To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each primary duty satisfactorily.
Incident Management & Environment Support:
Lead L1 and L2 support engineers in all incident response activities including triage, investigation, coordination, resolution, closure, and post-incident reporting.
Oversee technical analysis of environment incidents across application deployments, middleware, and platform layers while coordinating response activities with internal engineering, platform, and application development teams.
Serve as Tier 3 escalation point for complex incidents beyond L2 capability — triaging, directing, and driving resolution across Platform (k8s, Kafka, TFE), S&I (deployment, middleware, storage, network), Security (Vault, certs, secrets), and App Dev teams.
Own the full incident lifecycle — from first alert through to RCA documentation and permanent fix or accepted workaround.
Drive post-incident reviews for all P1 and P2 incidents, ensuring root cause is identified, documented, and actioned — not filed.
SLA Governance & Operational Standards:
Define, publish, and enforce SLA targets across all severity levels:
P1 (Critical): 15-minute response, 2-hour resolution
P2 (High): 30-minute response, 4-hour resolution
P3 (Medium): 2-hour response, 8-hour resolution
P4 (Low): 4-hour response, 24-hour resolution
Monitor SLA compliance in real time; escalate breaches immediately and report trends to leadership on a sprint cadence.
Ensure incident priority classifications are accurate, consistent, and applied at point of triage — not revised post-resolution.
Publish monthly SLA compliance reports to leadership with trend analysis and improvement actions.
Alert Tuning & MTTR Improvement:
Lead alert tuning and noise reduction initiatives across monitoring toolsets — on-call engineers are paged for situations requiring human judgement, not system noise.
Track and publish the alert-to-incident ratio each sprint; hold the team accountable to a visible and improving trend.
Drive continuous improvement on Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) — analyzed by environment, severity, and team tier; reported quarterly with commentary on trend and action.
Identify recurring incident patterns and open Problem records; drive permanent fixes, not repeated workarounds.
Lead automation and tooling initiatives to reduce toil, accelerate triage, and eliminate manual steps from the support workflow.
Documentation & Knowledge Management:
Ensure accurate, complete documentation for every incident — symptoms, steps taken, diagnostics, resolution, and RCA where applicable.
Own the runbook library — every novel resolution produces a runbook published to L1 before the incident is closed; coverage gaps are tracked and closed sprint-on-sprint.
Maintain environment configuration documentation and operational procedures in a current, accessible, and team-reviewed state.
Supervisory Responsibilities:
Lead a team of 6–10 L1 and L2 support engineers and contingent labor within the Environment Operations function.
Manage team scheduling to ensure full coverage of production support windows including on-call rotations, shift handoffs, and escalation availability for 24×7 support responsibilities.
Perform all talent management functions including performance reviews, direct and timely feedback, goal setting, and administrative functions as required.
Confer with and advise team members on operational policies and procedures, technical priorities, escalation paths, and resolution methods.
Promote employee development through structured career-planning sessions, identification of training opportunities, and scheduling of relevant conferences, certifications, and skill-building programs.
Build and maintain a clear L1 to L2 career progression path — internal promotion is the first option for L2 vacancies.
Review scheduling, training plans, and team capacity with senior leadership on a regular cadence to ensure the team is resourced and developed for the demands of the role
Qualifications:
The requirements listed are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the primary functions.
Proven team leadership experience — taking initiative, driving follow-through, and holding a team accountable to defined standards across varying incident types and urgencies.
Demonstrated ability to operate as a strong team player — working across L1, L2, Platform, Security, and App Dev teams on both long-running improvement programs and rapid incident response under tight deadlines.
Deep experience in production environment supports hands-on knowledge of application deployment pipelines, container orchestration, messaging platforms, and middleware infrastructure.
Ability to create, tune, and maintain monitoring alerts and operational runbooks independently.
Effective and excellent oral and written communication skills — able to translate technical incident detail into clear, concise leadership reporting without loss of accuracy.
Strong analytical, judgement, and consultation skills — able to triage ambiguous situations, make sound decisions under pressure, and consult effectively across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Ability to work independently and manage multiple parallel priorities with strong organizational discipline.
Technical Skills:
Deployment & Pipeline tooling: Harness (continuous delivery pipelines, deployment verification, rollback automation), Jenkins (CI/CD pipeline management, job configuration, build troubleshooting), GitHub (branching strategies, pull request workflows, pipeline integration).
Container & orchestration platforms: Kubernetes (k8s) pod lifecycle management, namespace operations, log retrieval, resource troubleshooting, and coordination with Platform teams on cluster-level issues.
Messaging & streaming platforms: Apache Kafka topic management, consumer group monitoring, lag analysis, and escalation to Platform for broker-level issues.
Secrets & configuration management: HashiCorp Vault — secrets retrieval, token/lease troubleshooting, policy review, and escalation to Security teams for certificate and secrets rotation.
Monitoring & observability: Proficiency in at least two production monitoring toolsets (e.g. Splunk, Dynatrace, Datadog, AppDynamics, Prometheus/Grafana) alert triage, dashboard interpretation, log analysis, and tuning requests.
Middleware platforms: Working knowledge of middleware infrastructure including application servers, messaging brokers, storage integrations, and network-layer dependencies sufficient to triage, gather diagnostics, and route correctly to L3.
Incident and ticketing platforms: ServiceNow or equivalent ITSM tooling incident creation, SLA tracking, problem record management, and reporting.
MTTR and operational metrics: Ability to build and maintain operational dashboards and reports covering MTTR, SLA compliance, alert-to-incident ratio, repeat incident rate, and deployment success rate.
Education and/or Experience:
Minimum 5 years of hands-on environment operations, production support, or infrastructure operations experience, including interdisciplinary experience across four or more of the following: application deployment pipelines, container platform operations, middleware support, incident management, monitoring and observability, configuration management, release engineering, platform operations, or scripting and automation.
Technical experience and comprehensive knowledge of production environment failure modes — including deployment failures, configuration drift, platform instability, and integration breakdowns — and the methodologies used to diagnose and resolve them.
Demonstrated experience defining and enforcing SLA frameworks in a tiered support model (L1/L2/L3 or equivalent).
Familiarity with financial services or other regulated-industry production environments is a strong advantage — understanding of change governance, audit requirements, and production access controls.
Industry knowledge of current and emerging practices in environment operations, platform reliability, and support automation.
Shift work and on-call availability required — including 24×7 on-call response capacity and availability during planned and emergency maintenance windows.
Previous people management or team lead experience required; formal people management experience strongly preferred.
Certificates or Licenses:
None required. The following are considered advantageous and will be recognized in the hiring process:
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) or equivalent platform certification
ITIL Foundation or above — demonstrating grounding in incident, problem, and change management frameworks
HashiCorp Vault Associate
Harness Certified Continuous Delivery Architect
Relevant cloud platform certification (AWS, Azure, or GCP) at associate level or above
About Us
The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) is the world's largest equity derivatives clearing organization. Founded in 1973, OCC is dedicated to promoting stability and market integrity by delivering clearing and settlement services for options, futures and securities lending transactions. As a Systemically Important Financial Market Utility (SIFMU), OCC operates under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. OCC has more than 100 clearing members and provides central counterparty (CCP) clearing and settlement services to 19 exchanges and trading platforms. More information about OCC is available at www.theocc.com.
Benefits
A highly collaborative and supportive environment developed to encourage work-life balance and employee wellness. Some of these components include:
Visit https://www.theocc.com/careers/thriving-together for more information.
Compensation
Salary Range
$140,800.00 - $232,500.00Incentive Range
8% to 15%This position is eligible for an annual discretionary incentive compensation award, for which the target range is listed above (see Incentive Range). The amount of such award, if any, will be based on various factors, including without limitation, both individual and company performance.
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Step 3
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OCC is an Equal Opportunity Employer