Senior Manager, Operational Excellence & AI Operations

Overview

Senior Manager, Operational Excellence & AI Operations owns operational excellence across Enterprise Systems & Employee Technology, including the operating standards, the central view of AI agents in production, and the accountability of each value stream and platform to its operational metrics, autonomy targets, ServiceNow adoption and productivity goals.

What you'll do

• Define and own operating standards for incident, major incident, problem, change, request, knowledge and CMDB/asset management that every value stream and platform follows.
• Run the operational scorecard grading each value stream and platform on availability, MTTR, MTTD, change success, incident recurrence, corrective-action closure and CMDB data quality, with targets, RAG bands and named owners.
• Chair the standing operational review, separate from the portfolio review, and drive remediation of misses to closure.
• Maintain one central view of every AI agent run across all value streams and platforms, including inventory, owner, purpose, performance, cost, incidents and controls, and report it to ESET leadership.
• Drive AIOps and agent-based workflows across applications and infrastructure, including alert triage, runbook automation, incident investigation and post-incident review, and report realized benefit.
• Partner with the Director, Autonomous Operations, to set and baseline yearly autonomy targets for L1 and L2 and tie service cost reduction to autonomy attained.
• Identify tools that make each engineer, analyst and consultant more productive, work with platform owners to enable them, and track adoption and productivity outcomes.
• Coordinate executive-level escalations and move the estate from post-incident review to proactive root-cause resolution.
• Chair the change governance forum and report change-success and emergency-change trends to executive leadership.
• Ensure every value stream fully adopts ServiceNow for ITSM, CMDB and related workflows, on both process and data.
• Hold managed-service providers to SLAs, OLAs and contracted autonomy milestones and run service reviews with Sourcing and responsible leaders.
• Own the operational data model and executive reporting, including the control-tower view.
• Represent operations in internal and external audits and build evidence collection into the scorecard.
• Advise ESET leadership on run-side risk, remediation priorities and operating-model implications, and coach operations leads and engineers on SLOs, incident response, observability and production readiness.

What you'll need

• 8+ years relevant experience and a Bachelor's degree or any equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Experience leading others.
• 8+ years in enterprise IT operations, service management or reliability, and a Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
• Experience leading operational governance across multiple organizations or vendors without direct authority over the teams measured.
• Experience building and running an operational scorecard or standard that changed behavior across organizations.
• Enterprise ITSM at scale across incident, problem, change and CMDB.
• Delivered measurable automation or AIOps outcomes, such as ticket deflection, MTTR reduction or cost reduction.
• Experience governing or monitoring AI agents or automation in production, including inventory, performance, cost and controls.
• Experience driving adoption of engineering or productivity tooling and measuring the outcome.
• Experience managing outsourced or multi-vendor service performance against SLAs and contracted targets.
• Hands-on experience with observability and incident tooling (Splunk, Datadog, Dynatrace or similar).
• Working knowledge of audit and control frameworks (SOC 1/2, ISO 27001, SOX IT general controls) and producing audit evidence.

Nice to have

• ServiceNow experience, including driving platform adoption and data quality across business units.
• Financial services or another regulated environment.
• Applying AI agents or LLM-driven workflows to operations.
• Digital employee-experience tooling (Nexthink or similar) and service-desk automation.
• ITIL 4 Managing Professional, Lean Six Sigma, SRE or cloud credentials.

Details

• Location: Bangalore, Karnataka, India.
• Hybrid work model: 3 days in the office and 2 days at the PayPal office or home workspace for most employees.