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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Operational Acceptance Specialist

💰 $80,000 - $130,000

OperationsITQuality AssuranceRelease Management

🎯 Role Definition

The Operational Acceptance Specialist (OAS) is the subject-matter expert responsible for ensuring new systems, releases, and changes meet operational readiness standards prior to production deployment. The OAS leads Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT), coordinates cross-functional go/no-go decisions, validates runbooks and monitoring, and ensures that people, process, and technology are prepared for service operation. This role focuses on release readiness, operational risk mitigation, incident readiness, and post-go-live verification to ensure stable, supportable, and secure production operations.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Release Coordinator / Release Manager
  • Technical Support Engineer or Senior Systems Administrator
  • QA/Test Engineer with operational testing experience

Advancement To:

  • Senior Operational Acceptance Lead
  • Release Manager / Head of Release Management
  • Service Transition Manager / IT Operations Manager
  • DevOps Engineering Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Change & Configuration Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead and own Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT) plans and execution for application, middleware, network, and infrastructure changes, ensuring all acceptance criteria are defined, executed, and signed off prior to production deployment.
  • Coordinate and facilitate cross-functional operational readiness reviews and go/no-go gates with engineering, QA, security, support, network, database, and business stakeholders to validate readiness for production releases.
  • Develop, maintain, and validate runbooks, playbooks, backout plans, and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for all supported services and releases, ensuring clarity, accuracy, and accessibility for support teams.
  • Validate monitoring, alerting, logging, and observability pipelines (e.g., Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, ELK) as part of acceptance; confirm thresholds, escalation rules, and dashboards are in place and tested.
  • Perform hands-on operational verification and smoke tests in pre-production and production environments to confirm successful deployment, configuration, connectivity, and basic functional behavior.
  • Assess and manage operational risk by identifying single points of failure, capacity constraints, and recovery gaps; produce actionable mitigation and contingency plans.
  • Author and enforce operational acceptance criteria (performance, security, backup, recoverability, data integrity, compliance) and map test coverage to those criteria.
  • Validate backup, restore, and disaster recovery procedures through targeted DR and recovery exercises tied to the release or change scope.
  • Ensure configuration management and CMDB entries are correct and complete for deployed components, and that configuration drift processes are defined and documented.
  • Coordinate and verify cutover and rollback procedures during deployment windows, and lead operational activities during go-lives to ensure smooth handover to run-the-business teams.
  • Manage readiness checklists, sign-off matrices, and evidence artifacts required for compliance audits and release retrospectives.
  • Drive automation and orchestration of acceptance tasks where feasible (e.g., automated pre-deployment checks, infrastructure validation scripts, health-check pipelines) to increase repeatability and reduce manual risk.
  • Conduct load, performance, and capacity sanity checks and validate that service-level objectives (SLOs) and service-level agreements (SLAs) are achievable and instrumented.
  • Work with security and compliance teams to validate that security controls, vulnerability scans, patching, and hardening requirements are satisfied for new deployments.
  • Triage and coordinate resolution of operational defects found during OAT, tracking issues to closure and validating fixes before sign-off.
  • Serve as the operational escalation point during deployments, coordinating incident response, communications, and mitigation steps between engineering and support teams.
  • Maintain strong documentation of operational acceptance artifacts, including test results, issues, decisions, and post-deployment verification records for auditability and continuous improvement.
  • Drive continuous improvement of operational acceptance processes and templates by collecting metrics (defect rates, rollback frequency, time-to-acceptance) and delivering process enhancements.
  • Provide training and onboarding for support and on-call teams, including runbook walkthroughs, knowledge transfer sessions, and tabletop exercises for incident scenarios.
  • Collaborate with Release Management and Change Management to align acceptance activities with change windows, CAB decisions, and release calendars.
  • Participate in post-implementation reviews (PIRs) and postmortems to capture lessons learned and action items tied back to operational readiness improvements.
  • Validate third-party vendor deployments and cloud-managed services for operational fit, ensuring SLAs, support models, and runbooks meet internal acceptance standards.
  • Ensure that deployment artifacts, runbooks, and monitoring configurations are version-controlled and traceable alongside release artifacts (Git, CM tools).
  • Evaluate new tooling and platform capabilities that improve operational readiness verification, such as synthetic testing, chaos engineering, and environment provisioning improvements.
  • Communicate clear, timely status updates and readiness summaries to senior stakeholders and release leadership, highlighting risks, mitigation progress, and go/no-go recommendations.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc operational data requests such as post-deployment telemetry analysis, incident trend reports, and availability metrics to help prioritize remediation.
  • Contribute to the organization’s operational readiness strategy and roadmap by providing practical feedback and measurable improvement targets.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate operational requirements and SLAs into technical acceptance criteria and engineering tasks.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies where the operational impact of features and technical debt is discussed, ensuring acceptance work is scoped and planned.
  • Mentor junior engineers and release coordinators on operational acceptance best practices, tooling, and runbook authoring.
  • Assist in designing and executing tabletop disaster recovery and incident response exercises to test people and process readiness.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT) planning and execution
  • Release and change management (strong knowledge of release gates, CAB processes, and deployment orchestration)
  • Runbook and playbook creation, maintenance, and version control
  • Monitoring and observability tools (Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, Splunk/ELK) and dashboard validation
  • Scripting and automation (Python, Bash, PowerShell) for health checks, validation scripts, and deployment verification
  • CI/CD and pipeline tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps) and integration of acceptance checks into pipelines
  • Cloud platforms and operations (AWS, Azure, or GCP) including cloud-specific operational readiness checks
  • Infrastructure-as-Code and configuration management awareness (Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet)
  • Performance and capacity validation (basic load testing, capacity planning insights)
  • Backup, restore, and disaster recovery validation knowledge
  • ITIL and incident/change management fundamentals
  • Familiarity with security validation: vulnerability scanning, patch validation, and compliance checks
  • CMDB and asset/configuration governance understanding
  • Logging and log analysis skills to validate post-deployment behavior
  • Familiarity with chaos testing principles and synthetic monitoring (desired)

Soft Skills

  • Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration skills
  • Clear written and verbal communication; able to write concise runbooks, acceptance reports, and executive summaries
  • Excellent attention to detail and methodical approach to operational verification
  • Analytical mindset and problem-solving under tight release timelines
  • Ability to influence and drive go/no-go decisions with technical and non-technical audiences
  • Prioritization and time-management skills in a fast-paced release environment
  • Facilitation skills for readiness reviews, war rooms, and postmortems
  • Continuous improvement mindset; metrics-minded and data-driven
  • Customer-focused orientation and understanding of business impact from operational risks
  • Resilience and calm under pressure during production incidents and cutovers

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or equivalent technical discipline; or equivalent professional experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a technical field; professional certifications such as ITIL Foundation, AWS/Azure certifications, or release management/certifications are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Systems
  • Software Engineering
  • Network Engineering
  • Cloud Computing / DevOps

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7+ years in IT operations, release management, site reliability engineering, or similar roles with demonstrated operational acceptance responsibilities.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years of hands-on experience coordinating and executing operational acceptance testing for enterprise applications or platforms, with direct exposure to production deployments and incident response.
  • Proven track record of reducing post-release incidents and rollbacks through improved operational acceptance and automation.
  • Experience working in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, telecom) or with rigorous compliance and audit requirements is highly desirable.
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