Associate Director, Service Ops Lead - People Services and Reward

Overview

Associate Director, Service Ops Lead for People Services and Reward, responsible for the stable, compliant and reliable operation of select HR Digital & Tech platforms, including Workday, and for leading operational service teams and partner-delivered support.

What you'll do

• Provide operational leadership across People Services and Reward platforms, ensuring system stability, availability and adherence to service levels, and act as primary internal escalation point for product and domain teams on service performance and major incidents.
• Govern incident, problem, change, configuration and release processes for domain platforms, ensuring operational compliance with ITSM policies and control frameworks, and define measurable outcomes for problem management (e.g., RCA closure time, recurrence prevention, defect trend reduction).
• Define and maintain service readiness and runbook quality standards (e.g. ServiceNow Knowledge), ensuring escalation paths, support tasks, data handling, continuity steps and deployment impacts are captured and validated before go-live.
• Create and oversee service plans for new and enhanced products, coordinating with Product Owners, third-party partners and platform/service teams to define SLAs, performance expectations and support handover criteria.
• Monitor platform performance, proactively identifying risks, trends and recurring issues, and implement improvement actions to strengthen stability and user experience.
• Coordinate with Platform Owners, engineering squads, solution architects and service teams to ensure changes, integrations, upgrades and releases are deployed safely and meet operational readiness standards.
• Lead operational readiness assessments, ensuring documentation, support models, monitoring coverage and non-functional controls are in place prior to deployment.
• Own operational dashboards, KPIs and reporting for the platforms, ensuring performance, risks and issues are communicated to senior stakeholders.
• Oversee root cause analysis for major incidents, ensuring sustainable fixes, clear remediation actions and preventative measures are identified and delivered.
• Maintain and continuously improve operational documentation, including runbooks, support procedures, configuration inventories and architectural operational views.
• Manage relationships with third-party vendors and managed service providers to ensure high-quality operational support and fulfilment of contractual obligations.
• Lead, mentor and coordinate operational support teams and partner resources across service desk, platform support, infrastructure, cloud services and application operations, ensuring clear accountability, timely delivery and effective escalation management.
• Collaborate with security, risk, compliance, infrastructure, product and engineering teams to ensure access controls, data handling, cyber security requirements, operational controls and compliance standards are embedded into day-to-day service operations.
• Where required, support extended operational coverage, escalation or on-call arrangements for critical incidents, major releases or high-priority business events.

What you'll need

• 15–19 years of experience in platform operations, enterprise application support, IT service management, system administration or technical delivery within complex environments.
• Strong experience supporting business-critical HR platforms such as Workday, Payroll and Time systems.
• Proven expertise in ITSM processes, including incident, problem, change, release and configuration management.
• Experience with enterprise tools such as ServiceNow, Jira, Azure DevOps, monitoring and knowledge management platforms.
• Strong understanding of system integrations, cloud technologies, monitoring, security, access controls, compliance, resilience and business continuity.
• Proven ability to manage platform performance, troubleshoot operational issues, lead root cause analysis and drive continuous improvement.
• Experience partnering with engineering, architecture and product teams to ensure operational readiness and safe deployment of changes.
• Experience maintaining runbooks, support procedures, operational KPIs, risk indicators, dashboards and readiness assessments.
• Experience working in Agile/DevOps environments, supporting continuous delivery while maintaining platform stability.
• Bachelor's/Master's degree in a relevant field or equivalent experience.

Nice to have

• ITIL, cloud, Agile/Scrum or DevOps certifications.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving capability, especially in complex operational scenarios.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to provide clarity during incidents and complex change cycles.
• Strong understanding of security, compliance and operational risk controls.
• Ability to lead cross-functional teams, influence without direct authority and promote operational discipline.
• Effective organisational skills, able to balance multiple priorities and manage time-sensitive escalations.
• Strong leadership and coaching capability, with the ability to develop others, build collaboration and create a high-performing service culture.
• Strong vendor, stakeholder and relationship management skills, with the ability to influence outcomes and drive accountability across internal and external teams.
• Ability to work flexibly across time zones and support critical service events, releases or escalations where required.
• Ability to work in a very fast-paced and fluid environment.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and change.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru Luxor North Tower.
• Hybrid working under GSK's "Performance with Choice" approach, typically 2–3 days per week in the office, with the pattern agreed between the candidate and their manager.