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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Technical Operations Associate

💰 $ - $

Technical OperationsDevOpsSite ReliabilityIT OperationsCloud Operations

🎯 Role Definition

The Technical Operations Associate is responsible for day-to-day operational health of production systems, rapid incident response, monitoring and alert tuning, release and change coordination, and automation of repetitive operational tasks. This role partners closely with engineering, product, and support teams to maintain SLAs/SLIs, perform root cause analysis, and continuously improve runbooks, observability, and deployment processes. The ideal candidate blends hands-on technical skills (Linux, scripting, cloud platforms, CI/CD) with strong communication, customer-focus, and process orientation to ensure resilient and scalable services.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior DevOps Engineer
  • IT Support / Systems Administrator
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Intern

Advancement To:

  • Senior Technical Operations Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • DevOps Engineer / Release Engineer

Lateral Moves:

  • Cloud Operations Engineer
  • Incident Response Lead
  • Production Support Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Monitor, triage and resolve production incidents across distributed systems, owning incident communication, severity assessment, and escalation to engineering owners until full resolution and post-incident review are complete.
  • Serve as primary on-call responder for platform availability, performing rapid mitigation actions, executing runbooks, and coordinating cross-functional troubleshooting with engineering, networking, and product teams.
  • Design, implement and maintain monitoring and observability dashboards and alerts (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, Splunk) to improve detection, reduce noise, and align to SLAs/SLIs and business impact.
  • Automate repetitive operational tasks using scripts and tools (Python, Bash, PowerShell) and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible) to increase team efficiency and reduce manual toil.
  • Operate and maintain container orchestration and runtime environments (Kubernetes, Docker), including deployments, health checks, resource tuning, and lifecycle management.
  • Manage release coordination, deployment pipelines, and CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI), ensuring safe rollouts, automated testing integration, and rollback procedures.
  • Perform routine infrastructure administration on Linux/Unix systems, including performance tuning, patch management, log analysis, capacity planning, and security hardening.
  • Execute root cause analysis (RCA) and write detailed postmortem reports with corrective actions, tracking remediation tasks and preventing recurrence.
  • Maintain and continuously improve operational runbooks, runplaybooks, and incident response procedures to reduce time-to-resolution and knowledge gaps across teams.
  • Implement and enforce change management procedures, communicate scheduled maintenance to stakeholders, and coordinate multi-team changes with minimal customer impact.
  • Work closely with application and platform engineers to diagnose production issues, reproduce defects, test fixes in staging, and validate production rollouts.
  • Operate cloud resources and manage cloud account hygiene (AWS, GCP, Azure), including cost optimizations, IAM policies, networking, backups, and disaster recovery configurations.
  • Investigate and remediate security alerts in partnership with security teams, applying patches, mitigation workarounds, and documentation of security incidents.
  • Execute and validate periodic operational readiness and recovery drills, including failover testing, backup validation, and disaster recovery runbooks.
  • Support data and telemetry pipelines by validating ingestion, transformations, and data quality, escalating pipeline failures and partnering with data engineering to remediate.
  • Drive continuous improvement initiatives for operational processes and tooling by proposing, prototyping, and implementing changes that measurably reduce incidents and manual effort.
  • Maintain and triage production support queues (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, ServiceNow), ensure SLAs are met, and provide timely updates to customers and internal stakeholders.
  • Assist with capacity planning and scaling strategies to ensure the platform meets performance and growth requirements while optimizing cost and resource allocation.
  • Participate in sprint planning, technical design reviews, and change advisory board (CAB) meetings to provide production impact perspective and operational constraints.
  • Provide L2/L3 support to internal teams and customers for complex production problems, including deep-dive debugging, log correlation, and temporary mitigations.
  • Ensure robust logging, metrics, and tracing instrumentation are available for new features and services to enable faster diagnosis and observability.
  • Manage vendor relationships and third-party service integrations for monitoring, logging, and infrastructure services, troubleshooting issues and coordinating escalations.
  • Create and deliver operational documentation, training sessions, and knowledge transfer to engineering and support teams to improve runbook adoption and response effectiveness.
  • Enforce best practices for backups, retention, and recovery testing, ensuring that recovery objectives are defined and met for critical systems.

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)

  • Production incident management and postmortem/RCA delivery.
  • Strong Linux/Unix administration and shell scripting (Bash).
  • Programming/scripting proficiency (Python, Go, or similar) for automation and tooling.
  • Containerization and orchestration experience with Docker and Kubernetes (k8s).
  • Cloud platform operational experience (AWS, GCP, or Azure) including IAM, networks, and cost considerations.
  • CI/CD tooling and pipeline management (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions).
  • Infrastructure-as-code and configuration management (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible).
  • Monitoring, logging and observability stacks (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Elastic Stack, Splunk).
  • SQL and basic data validation/query skills for log and metrics analysis.
  • Familiarity with incident management platforms (PagerDuty, Opsgenie) and ITSM tools (ServiceNow, JIRA).
  • Basic networking knowledge (TCP/IP, DNS, load balancers, TLS) and troubleshooting.
  • Security awareness for operations: patching, vulnerability remediation, least privilege principles.
  • Backup and disaster recovery planning and execution.
  • Performance tuning and capacity planning for production services.

Soft Skills

  • Clear written and verbal communication for incident updates, runbooks, and stakeholder alignment.
  • Strong analytical and problem-solving mindset; can triage and break down complex issues.
  • Customer-centric orientation with the ability to manage expectations and provide timely updates.
  • Effective prioritization and time management under high-pressure situations.
  • Collaborative team player, able to coordinate across engineering, product, and support teams.
  • Adaptability to frequently changing priorities and fast-paced production environments.
  • Attention to detail for documentation, compliance, and reproducibility of operational tasks.
  • Proactive mindset: identifies operational gaps and drives automation or process improvements.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical discipline OR equivalent practical experience in systems administration, support, or DevOps.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or related fields.
  • Industry certifications such as AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner/Associate, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), or ITIL Foundation are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology
  • Software Engineering
  • Systems Engineering
  • Network Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 1–4 years of hands-on experience in technical operations, systems administration, DevOps, SRE, or production support roles.

Preferred:

  • 2–5 years supporting production cloud-native services with demonstrated experience in incident response, automation, and observability.
  • Prior on-call and pager duty experience, with documented contributions to reducing MTTR and improving operational playbooks.
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