Senior Manager, Operational Excellence & AI Operations

Overview

Senior Manager, Operational Excellence & AI Operations owns operational standards, the central operational scorecard, AI agent visibility, and the autonomy, ServiceNow adoption and productivity targets across Enterprise Systems & Employee Technology (ESET).

What you'll do

• Define and own the 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 escalate misses and drive remediation 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 set the standard for registering, monitoring and retiring agents.
• Drive AIOps and agent-based workflows across applications and infrastructure, including alert triage, runbook automation, incident investigation and post-incident review.
• Set and baseline yearly autonomy targets (human-touch reduction) for L1 and L2, track milestones, and tie service cost reduction to autonomy attained.
• Identify the tools that make each engineer, analyst and consultant more productive, enable them with platform owners, 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.
• Led operational governance across multiple organizations or vendors without direct authority over the teams measured.
• Built and ran an operational scorecard or standard that changed behavior across organizations.
• Enterprise ITSM at scale across incident, problem, change and CMDB; ServiceNow strongly preferred, including driving platform adoption and data quality across business units.
• 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: inventory, performance, cost and controls.
• Drove adoption of engineering or productivity tooling and measured the outcome.
• Managed outsourced or multi-vendor service performance against SLAs and contracted targets.
• Hands-on 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

• 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 your choice of PayPal office or home workspace, for most employees.
• Travel: 0%.