Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT Operations Manager

🎯 Role Definition

The IT Operations Manager oversees day-to-day IT infrastructure and service delivery to ensure high availability, reliability, and performance of systems supporting business operations. This role combines technical leadership, process ownership (ITIL-aligned), vendor and stakeholder management, incident and change control, capacity planning, and continuous improvement to meet SLAs and strategic IT objectives. The IT Operations Manager partners with security, network, cloud, and application teams to drive dependable operations, disaster recovery readiness, and cost-effective infrastructure evolution.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Systems Administrator / Lead Systems Engineer
IT Service Delivery Manager / Incident Manager
Infrastructure Team Lead / Network Operations Center (NOC) Lead

Advancement To:

Director of IT Operations
Head of Infrastructure & Cloud Operations
VP of Technology / Chief Information Officer (CIO)

Lateral Moves:

Cloud Operations Manager (DevOps-focused)
Security Operations Manager (SecOps)
IT Program Manager / IT Service Management Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead the daily operations of on-premises and cloud infrastructure (compute, storage, virtualization, networking, and backup) to maintain 24x7 availability and meet defined service level agreements (SLAs).
Own end-to-end incident management processes, acting as escalation point for severity 1 and severity 2 incidents, coordinating cross-functional response teams and post-incident root cause analyses with actionable remediation plans.
Manage change control and release management activities, ensuring changes are risk-assessed, scheduled, communicated, and audited to minimize service disruption and maintain compliance with governance frameworks.
Define, monitor, and report operational KPIs and metrics (uptime, MTTR, MTTD, capacity utilization, incident volume, change success rate) and use data to drive continuous improvement initiatives.
Develop and execute capacity planning and performance optimization strategies for infrastructure and platform services, forecasting growth and recommending right-sized investments to avoid bottlenecks and over-provisioning.
Own IT asset lifecycle and configuration management, maintaining accurate CMDB records, coordinating hardware refresh cycles, and optimizing licensing and support contracts to control costs.
Implement and maintain disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BCP) plans, conducting regular DR drills, verifying RTO/RPO targets, and documenting recovery procedures for critical systems.
Lead vendor and outsourcing relationships, negotiating SLAs, evaluating vendor performance, ensuring contractual obligations are met, and managing third-party escalations and renewals.
Drive automation and standardization of operational tasks (provisioning, monitoring, patching, backup, and deployment) using scripts, orchestration tools, and IaC (Infrastructure as Code) to improve reliability and reduce manual toil.
Collaborate with cloud architects and application owners to plan and execute migrations, cloud adoption strategies, and hybrid infrastructure configurations while optimizing cost and security.
Ensure compliance with security policies and regulatory requirements by coordinating vulnerability management, patching programs, access reviews, and collaboration with the security team on incident response.
Manage team capacity, recruiting, mentoring, and performance management for system administrators, engineers, and operations staff, fostering a high-performance, on-call-ready culture.
Oversee configuration and management of enterprise monitoring and observability platforms (metrics, logs, traces, synthetic transactions) to provide actionable visibility and proactive alerting across services.
Lead cost optimization initiatives across cloud and on-premises environments, implementing tagging, rightsizing, reserved instances, and operational processes to reduce unnecessary spend.
Partner with product, development, and QA teams to integrate operational requirements into the CI/CD pipeline and ensure production readiness for new releases through runbooks, canary deployments, and rollback plans.
Establish and maintain incident communication protocols and stakeholder updates during major outages, ensuring transparency and timely remediation while minimizing business impact.
Implement and operate backup and recovery solutions, ensuring consistent backup schedules, retention policies, and successful restore procedures for business-critical data and applications.
Conduct periodic risk assessments of the IT operations environment, recommending mitigations for single points of failure, technical debt, and architectural vulnerabilities.
Maintain documentation and runbooks for operational procedures, on-call rotations, escalation matrices, and standard operating procedures to enable rapid knowledge transfer and consistent execution.
Coordinate cross-functional post-mortems and continuous improvement workshops to close action items, measure remediation effectiveness, and reduce recurrence of high-impact incidents.
Ensure high-quality customer service for internal business users and external customers by aligning IT support tiers, knowledge base content, and incident resolution SLAs.
Manage and track operational budgets, capital expenditures (CapEx), and operational expenses (OpEx) related to infrastructure, tools, and vendor services.
Drive adoption of modern operational practices such as SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) principles, error budgets, and service-level objectives (SLOs) where applicable.
Evaluate and pilot new infrastructure technologies, automation tooling, and managed services to enhance resilience, scalability, and developer productivity.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Infrastructure management (Linux and Windows server administration, virtualization with VMware/Hyper-V, and physical server lifecycle).
Cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform — practical experience with EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, Azure VM, GCP Compute, and managed services.
Networking fundamentals: routing, switching, load balancing, VPNs, firewalls, and SD-WAN concepts.
Monitoring, observability and logging tools: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, ELK stack or similar.
Automation and orchestration: Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, PowerShell, or equivalent IaC and configuration management tooling.
Containerization and orchestration: Docker and Kubernetes (k8s) operational experience and cluster lifecycle management.
Backup, replication and disaster recovery technologies: Veeam, NetBackup, Zerto or cloud-native backup solutions.
ITIL-aligned service management: incident, problem, change, configuration, and release management best practices.
Security and compliance foundations: vulnerability management, patch management, IAM, encryption, and experience supporting audits (PCI, SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR).
Scripting and automation: Bash, Python, PowerShell or similar for operational automation and integration.
Database operations familiarity: basic administration and high-availability patterns for MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or NoSQL systems.
Cost governance and cloud economics: tagging strategies, reserved instances, autoscaling and cost monitoring tools.
CI/CD tooling familiarity: Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or equivalent pipelines integration with operations.
Service-level management: defining, measuring and reporting SLAs, SLOs, and error budgets.

Soft Skills

Leadership and people management: ability to coach teams, set clear goals, and drive accountability in a fast-paced environment.
Incident communication and crisis management: calm, clear communicator who directs cross-functional teams and stakeholders during outages.
Strategic thinking and planning: aligns operational roadmaps to business goals and anticipates capacity and risk needs.
Problem solving and root cause analysis: methodical approach to diagnosing complex system failures and implementing durable fixes.
Stakeholder management and negotiation: manages vendor relationships, negotiates contracts, and balances business priorities.
Prioritization and time management: focuses on high-impact work, balancing operational fire-fighting with long-term improvements.
Collaboration and cross-functional influence: works effectively across development, security, network, and product teams.
Continuous learning and adaptability: embraces new technologies, automation, and operational methodologies.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Systems Engineering, or related technical discipline — or equivalent professional experience.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or Business Administration with technology focus.
Certifications such as ITIL Foundation, VMware Certified Professional, AWS Certified SysOps Administrator / AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), or PMP are advantageous.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Information Technology / Systems
Network Engineering
Cybersecurity
Cloud Computing

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–10+ years in IT infrastructure, systems administration, or operations roles with at least 2–4 years in a leadership or managerial capacity.

Preferred: Proven track record managing 24x7 operations for enterprise-scale environments, leading cross-functional incident responses, driving automation and cloud migrations, and achieving measurable improvements in availability, cost, and operational efficiency.