Associate Director - Production Support
First seen by Alion on Sep 26, 2026.
Associate Director - Production Support
Location: Hyderabad
Experience: 18+ Years
Employment Type: Full-time
Function: Technology / IT Operations / Application Production Support
Job Summary:
We are looking for an experienced Associate Director - Production Support to lead enterprise application production support and operational governance across Tier 1 and Tier 2 digital platforms.
The role will be responsible for defining and executing the offshore production support strategy, driving application stability and resilience, leading major incident management, and ensuring operational excellence across a highly interconnected digital ecosystem.
The successful candidate will lead a Hyderabad-based organization comprising FTEs, contractors, and strategic partners, while partnering with engineering, SRE, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and business stakeholders to improve service reliability, reduce operational risk, and accelerate AI and automation-led transformation.
Key Responsibilities:
1. Production Support Leadership & Operational Governance:
- Define and execute the offshore production support strategy and target operating model across enterprise digital platforms.
- Establish governance frameworks, service standards, decision rights, risk controls, and executive review mechanisms.
- Drive portfolio-level objectives and performance measures covering availability, resilience, customer experience, regulatory compliance, and SLA attainment.
- Lead cross-platform prioritization and investment decisions based on business impact, operational risk, capacity, and modernization priorities.
- Provide executive-level accountability for service health, operational risks, and transformation outcomes.
2. Major Incident & Problem Management:
- Provide leadership and decision-making oversight for L1.5, L2, and L3 production incidents, ensuring timely impact assessment, escalation, communication, and recovery.
- Establish and govern an integrated major incident, problem, and crisis management framework across application, infrastructure, security, vendor, and business teams.
- Drive effective root cause analysis (RCA), permanent corrective actions, and closure of systemic issues.
- Lead reliability reviews to identify recurring incidents, operational risks, concentration risks, and critical dependencies.
- Ensure high-severity incidents are managed with clear ownership, mitigation plans, and timely executive communication.
3. Team Leadership & Delivery Management:
- Build and lead a multi-platform production support organization comprising Hyderabad-based FTEs, contractors, and strategic partners.
- Define organizational structures, leadership roles, workforce strategy, and sourcing models to deliver resilient 24x7 support.
- Develop leadership capability through succession planning, coaching, and targeted technical and operational development.
- Establish outcome-based accountability across teams, fostering ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
- Own workforce capacity planning, financial stewardship, vendor performance, and operational readiness for business-critical applications.
4. AI, Automation & Operational Modernization:
- Define and execute the AI, automation, observability, and operational modernization roadmap for L2 production support.
- Sponsor initiatives such as intelligent incident triage, event correlation, predictive detection, automated remediation, and self-healing operations.
- Partner with engineering, SRE, architecture, data, cybersecurity, and platform teams to embed reliability and operational readiness into the delivery lifecycle.
- Establish measurable outcomes across incident prevention, MTTR reduction, automation adoption, productivity, service quality, and cost efficiency.
- Promote responsible AI adoption, operational controls, risk management, and sustainable support practices.
5. Stakeholder & Vendor Management:
- Act as the senior offshore partner and escalation point for onshore technology and business leaders, product teams, SRE, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and strategic vendors.
- Translate business priorities and customer impact into operational strategy, investment proposals, and transformation roadmaps.
- Lead executive service reviews covering performance, risks, capacity, financials, transformation progress, and decisions required.
- Influence cross-functional teams to resolve systemic dependencies and improve business-critical digital journeys.
- Own strategic vendor and partner governance, including service quality, commercial performance, accountability, and continuous value improvement.
Required Qualifications & Experience:
- 18+ years of experience in Application Production Support, IT Operations, Application Operations, or related technology operations functions.
- Minimum 10 years of experience in a leadership role managing large-scale production support or application operations teams.
- Strong experience supporting large-scale digital platforms, including web, mobile, APIs, or enterprise applications in a 24x7 environment.
- Proven expertise in Major Incident Management, Problem Management, cross-functional escalation, and executive stakeholder communications.
- Experience managing offshore delivery organizations comprising FTEs, contractors, and strategic partners.
- Strong understanding of ITIL, SRE, operational excellence, service reliability, and production support governance.
- Demonstrated ability to drive operational performance, service stability, risk management, and continuous improvement.
- Strong executive communication, decision-making, and leadership skills.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience supporting healthcare, financial services, or other regulated digital platforms.
- Exposure to AI-driven operations, AIOps, automation, and L2/L3 operational efficiency initiatives.
- Familiarity with observability, monitoring, APM, and ITSM platforms such as ServiceNow.
- Experience implementing automated remediation, event correlation, predictive monitoring, or self-healing capabilities.
- Experience managing large-scale technology transformation and operational modernization programs.
Skills
Problem Management, ITIL, ServiceNow, Production Support, Incident Management, Site Reliability, ITSM