Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Operations Support Specialist

🎯 Role Definition

The Operations Support Specialist is a hands-on operational professional responsible for ensuring reliable day-to-day service delivery, incident resolution, and continuous improvement of operational processes. This role acts as the first line of defense for operational incidents, manages inbound tickets, monitors systems, escalates complex issues, and partners with engineering, product, and customer-facing teams to maintain SLAs and improve uptime. The ideal candidate balances technical troubleshooting (logs, scripts, configuration) with clear stakeholder communication and documentation to reduce repeat incidents and optimize operational workflows.

Keywords: Operations Support Specialist, operations support, incident management, ticketing systems, ITIL, SLA management, monitoring, root cause analysis, process improvement, service delivery.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Technical Support Specialist / Help Desk Technician
Junior Systems Administrator / IT Support Analyst
Customer Support or Service Desk roles with escalations

Advancement To:

Senior Operations Support Specialist / Lead
Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or Production Engineer
Service Delivery Manager / Operations Manager

Lateral Moves:

DevOps Engineer (automation-focused)
Incident Manager / Problem Management Lead
Customer Success Engineer / Solutions Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Monitor production systems, application health dashboards, and service alerts (Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, CloudWatch) and respond immediately to incidents to minimize customer impact and meet SLA targets.
Triage inbound tickets from ServiceNow/Jira/ Zendesk and other ticketing systems, accurately classify priority and severity, and drive timely resolution or escalation according to runbooks and playbooks.
Act as an on-call responder in rotation, owning incident communications, coordinating cross-functional response teams, providing written incident summaries, and ensuring timely post-incident reviews and follow-up actions.
Conduct root cause analysis (RCA) for incidents, document findings, propose permanent fixes, and track remediation tasks through to closure with engineering or vendor teams.
Execute operational runbook procedures for system restarts, backup verification, failover testing, and routine maintenance to keep systems in a healthy state.
Perform user-access administration and role-based access control (RBAC) tasks, including provisioning, deprovisioning, and periodic access reviews in Active Directory, Okta, or similar identity platforms.
Troubleshoot infrastructure and application issues across Linux/Windows servers, containers, network components, and cloud services (AWS, Azure, GCP) using logs, metrics, and tracing.
Maintain and update knowledge base articles, runbooks, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and internal documentation to accelerate incident resolution and training.
Coordinate scheduled change management and deployments with release managers and stakeholders, validate post-deployment health checks, and roll back if necessary following approved change procedures.
Manage vendor and third-party support relationships for hosted services, network providers, or SaaS products; open vendor escalations, track SLAs, and validate vendor fixes.
Automate repetitive operational tasks using scripting (Python, Bash, PowerShell) and small automation pipelines to reduce MTTR and manual toil.
Collect and report on operational metrics (MTTR, MTTA, SLA compliance, incident frequency), prepare weekly/monthly dashboards, and recommend process improvements based on trend analysis.
Execute backup, snapshot, and restore procedures; validate recoverability and document recovery testing results as part of business continuity practices.
Support capacity planning activities by monitoring resource utilization, forecasting demand, and raising recommendations for scaling compute, storage, or network resources.
Participate in incident post-mortems, lead root cause investigations, and translate outcomes into prioritized remediation backlogs with measurable acceptance criteria.
Provide tier-2 and tier-3 troubleshooting support to customer-facing teams and escalate to engineering when changes to code, architecture, or major configuration are required.
Perform release verification and smoke testing after deployments, validating core functionality and documenting any regressions or anomalies for fast rollback if needed.
Ensure compliance with operational policies and audit requirements, collect evidence for audits, and support remediation of control gaps related to security, change management, and access controls.
Drive continuous improvement projects aimed at reducing incident volume via preventive measures, such as better monitoring, stricter schema validation, or upstream bug fixes.
Maintain shift handover notes and runbooks for 24/7 operations, ensuring smooth continuity between shifts and minimizing information loss during transitions.
Assist with asset inventory and lifecycle management, tagging hardware and tracking software licenses, and coordinating repairs or replacements with procurement.
Mentor junior support staff, provide training sessions on monitoring tools, incident procedures, and escalation paths to build team resilience and response capability.
Support ad-hoc cross-functional initiatives (onboarding new services, migrations, integrations) by validating operational readiness, performing cutover validation, and assisting with rollback planning.
Manage emergency incident communications to internal stakeholders and customers, drafting status messages, escalation notices, and final incident reports to maintain transparency and trust.

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.
Assist product teams with operational readiness checklists for new features or releases.
Provide feedback to the engineering and product organizations to improve observability and debuggability of services.
Participate in disaster recovery drills and assist in revising DR playbooks based on lessons learned.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Strong experience with ticketing and ITSM systems (ServiceNow, Jira Service Desk, Zendesk) for incident triage, SLA tracking, and change management.
Proficiency with monitoring and observability tools such as Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, Prometheus, Grafana, or CloudWatch to analyze metrics, logs, and traces.
Solid troubleshooting skills on Linux and Windows server environments, including shell commands, process and service management, and log analysis.
Practical scripting ability in Python, Bash, or PowerShell to automate operational tasks, write small tools, and implement health checks.
Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) — common services (EC2, S3, RDS, IAM, VPC) and operational practices for cloud-based infrastructure.
Knowledge of incident management and ITIL principles (incident, problem, change, and release management) and SLA-driven support models.
Experience with source control and CI/CD tools (Git, GitLab, Jenkins, GitHub Actions) to support deployment validation and rollback processes.
Competence with networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, load balancers, firewall basics) to debug connectivity and latency issues.
Ability to query and analyze data using SQL for troubleshooting operational incidents and producing metrics reports.
Familiarity with identity management and access control systems (Active Directory, Okta, LDAP) and secure credential handling.
Experience with backup, restore, and disaster recovery procedures and tooling.
Exposure to containerization and orchestration platforms (Docker, Kubernetes) for container lifecycle troubleshooting.
Basic knowledge of security controls, vulnerability management, and compliance frameworks relevant to operations.

Soft Skills

Clear, professional written and verbal communication for incident updates, status reports, and technical documentation.
Strong customer-focused mindset with empathy and patience when working with internal and external stakeholders.
Excellent prioritization and time management skills to handle multiple concurrent incidents and requests under pressure.
Analytical problem-solving and critical thinking, able to trace root causes across systems and suggest pragmatic fixes.
Team collaboration and cross-functional influencing to coordinate responses with engineering, product, and vendor partners.
Adaptability and resilience during high-severity incidents and fast-changing operational priorities.
Attention to detail for accurate documentation, change execution, and audit evidence preparation.
Proactive ownership and accountability: drive issues to resolution without constant supervision.
Teaching and mentorship ability to upskill junior team members and improve team-wide practices.
Continuous improvement mindset, comfortable with process measurement and iterative optimization.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Associate degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Business Operations, or equivalent professional experience.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Business Administration, or related field.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Information Technology / Systems
Network Engineering
Business Operations / Management
Software Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

2–5 years of relevant operations, technical support, or systems administration experience; range may vary by employer.

Preferred:

3+ years in an operations support, SRE, or production support role with proven incident management, monitoring, and automation experience; demonstrated familiarity with cloud platforms, ITSM tools, and process improvement projects.