Head of Application Operations

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: London

Reporting To: VP Platform Engineering & Technical Operations

Compensation: £115,000 - £120,000 / year

Reward Gateway and Edenred are global leaders in employee benefits and engagement, helping organisations attract, engage and retain talent through a unified employee experience platform.

Guided by the missions "Making the World a Better Place to Work" and "Enriching connections, for good", we focus on improving employee engagement and building resilient workplaces that enhance people's daily lives.

As Director of Application Operations, you will partner with the VP PETO to shape and deliver the support and operability vision, ensuring our applications and platforms are well operated, and the experience of our users globally has the correct priority, whilst enabling our Engineering teams to innovate.

You will lead a key domain within the PETO organisation, driving high quality and timely technical support operations while embedding modern engineering practices and striving for continual improvement.

Your domain will be a key enabler in delivering great service to our customers and to our Engineering teams, and you will drive this through effective KPIs and metrics. You will liaise closely with your peers across the PETO organisation, including Data, Platform & Infrastructure to drive a coherent strategy.

You will align priorities with business goals to deliver reliable, high quality experiences for our customers, merchants and their employees.

• Lead the Application Operations strategy with PETO leadership, redesigning ITIL processes, ticket flows and the operating model to build a best in class function.
• Re engineer Jira Service Management workflows, queues, automations, and implement a unified Service Catalogue mapping services to owners, SLAs/SLOs, request types, runbooks and escalation paths.
• Establish strong intake and triage controls, with clear priority/severity definitions, escalation criteria and evidence standards to increase L2 first time resolution and protect L3 capacity.
• Own end to end incident management, embedding industry standard major incident practices, command roles, stakeholder communications, status pages and high quality post incident reviews.
• Build and run the Problem Management function, driving RCA and preventative actions that reduce recurrence and improve system resilience.
• Shift Technical Operations toward proactive protections (SLOs, error budgets, early warning signals, auto remediation, runbook automation) while maintaining excellent reactive response.
• Define the PETO TechOps model, standardising incident, problem and change processes and integrating change enablement with JSM/Service Catalogue guardrails to reduce change failure rate.
• Build and maintain a knowledge base and operability standards-runbooks, playbooks, ownership models, on call readiness-to support shift left and consistent operational quality.
• Define and manage data driven KPIs (MTTR, MTTD, recurrence, L2 resolution %, SLO/SLA compliance, CSAT), using insights to drive prioritisation and improvement.
• Develop the team from L2 to L2.5 capability through automation, safe configuration changes, feature flag operations and scripted runbooks to reduce escalations.
• Lead and grow senior operations engineers, establishing career pathways, succession planning and a culture of excellence and accountability.
• Partner with executives and cross functional teams to align Technical Operations impact with product and customer value, balancing technical debt and business priorities.

• Expert ITIL practitioner with experience designing and maturing Incident, Problem and Change Management in agile, product led environments.
• Deep Jira Service Management expertise (workflows, queues, automations, SLAs), plus strong Service Catalogue and Confluence knowledge management capability.
• Skilled in building triage and escalation models that maximise L2 resolution, protect L3 focus and ensure high quality, reproducible handoffs.
• Experienced major incident lead, proficient in incident command, stakeholder communications, status page practices and driving effective RCAs.
• Strong Problem Management and RCA facilitation with a track record of implementing preventative actions that reduce operational risk.
• Proficient with observability and ITSM tooling to enable proactive monitoring, SLO/SLA definition and data driven operational dashboards.
• Strong people leadership with experience organising teams for fast execution, accountability and healthy on call practices.
• Clear, concise communicator able to translate complex technical issues for all stakeholder levels.
• Strong background in integrating ITIL practices into modern Agile, product centric ways of working.
• Solid commercial and product understanding with the ability to balance operational readiness, technical debt and delivery priorities.
• Experience advancing support teams toward L2.5 capabilities through automation, runbooks and safe operational guardrails.
• Familiarity with cloud native and API first architectures, partner integrations and ecosystem level monitoring.
• Experience establishing OKRs and operational performance metrics (including DORA) to drive continuous improvement.

• Online interview with the Talent Acquisition Partner
• Interview with the VP Platform Engineering & Technical Operations & VP Engineering

At Reward Gateway Edenred we are committed to ensuring an inclusive and accessible recruitment process for all candidates. If you have any specific requirements or need reasonable adjustments at any stage of the recruitment journey, please let your Talent Acquisition Partner know. Your needs are important to us, and we want to ensure an equitable experience for every candidate.

Be comfortable. Be you. At Reward Gateway, we want all our employees to feel comfortable bringing their passion, creativity and individuality to work. We value all cultures, backgrounds, and experiences, as we truly believe that diversity drives innovation. Express yourself, join our community and help us Make the World a Better Place to Work.