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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Xenon Operations Analyst

💰 $ - $

OperationsSaaSPlatformAnalyticsSecurity

🎯 Role Definition

The Xenon Operations Analyst is responsible for the reliable operation, monitoring, automation, and continuous improvement of the Xenon platform and its services. This role combines hands-on technical troubleshooting (incident management, observability, automation) with process ownership (SLA management, runbooks, change control) and cross-functional stakeholder collaboration to ensure platform stability, performance, and cost efficiency.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Operations Analyst / Platform Support Engineer
  • Technical Support Engineer or IT Operations Technician
  • Junior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) or DevOps Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Senior Xenon Operations Analyst / Senior SRE
  • Platform Reliability Manager / Service Reliability Engineer II
  • Operations Lead / Manager, Platform Operations

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer
  • Data Engineer / Analytics Engineer
  • Product Operations or Customer Reliability Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Serve as the primary on-call responder for Xenon platform incidents, performing triage, mitigation, escalation, and post-incident documentation to meet SLA and reliability targets.
  • Lead root cause analysis (RCA) after major incidents, preparing formal incident reports with timelines, impact analysis, remediation steps, and preventive actions; drive follow-through on RCA recommendations.
  • Build, maintain, and optimize monitoring, alerting, and observability for the Xenon stack (metrics, logs, traces) using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or equivalent to reduce MTTD/MTTR.
  • Design, implement, and maintain runbooks and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for operational tasks, maintenance windows, failover procedures, and disaster recovery scenarios.
  • Automate repetitive operational workflows using scripting (Python, Bash) and orchestration tools to decrease manual toil and increase deployment reliability.
  • Manage daily platform health checks, capacity planning, and performance tuning to ensure system stability and predictable scaling behavior under load.
  • Collaborate with engineering teams to own and improve CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies (blue/green, canary), and rollback plans to minimize operational risk.
  • Monitor cloud infrastructure and costs (AWS, GCP, or Azure), recommend optimizations, and implement tagging, rightsizing, or reserved instance strategies to control spend.
  • Maintain configuration-as-code and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) artifacts using tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to ensure reproducible and auditable deployments.
  • Manage integrations between Xenon and third-party systems (auth providers, observability, billing, third-party APIs), ensuring secure, reliable, and documented interfaces.
  • Implement and enforce change management processes for production configuration changes, including scheduling, communication, and post-change validation to minimize disruption.
  • Support capacity forecasting and resource allocation for critical services, coordinating with product managers and engineering to prioritize investments and mitigate bottlenecks.
  • Conduct regular vulnerability and compliance checks, working with security teams to remediate findings and support audits and regulatory reporting as required.
  • Maintain and evolve incident and problem management tooling (ServiceNow, Jira Service Desk, PagerDuty), ensuring tickets are triaged, routed, and resolved according to SLA.
  • Produce operational dashboards, KPI reports, and executive summaries for SLOs, availability, incident trends, and release readiness to inform stakeholders and leadership.
  • Act as a liaison between platform engineering, product teams, customer success, and external vendors to coordinate releases, escalations, and impact communications.
  • Drive continuous improvement through post-mortems, process changes, and automation projects that measurably reduce incident frequency and manual intervention.
  • Test, validate, and document backup, restore, and disaster recovery procedures for critical Xenon components; perform DR rehearsals and maintain recovery objectives.
  • Lead onboarding and knowledge transfer for new team members; maintain an up-to-date knowledge base and internal wiki that documents operational best practices.
  • Implement synthetic monitoring and user-experience checks to proactively detect regressions in key customer journeys and APIs.
  • Support capacity for scheduled maintenance and release windows, orchestrating cross-functional stakeholders and validating rollbacks when necessary.
  • Evaluate and pilot new observability, reliability, and cost-management tools; provide recommendations and roadmaps for adoption across the platform.

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 and support teams with escalated customer incidents requiring deep platform knowledge.
  • Train internal teams on operational changes, new monitoring dashboards, and incident response playbooks.
  • Maintain vendor relationships for hosted services and managed components; coordinate escalation paths and SLAs with third-party providers.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong incident management and post-incident RCA experience; familiarity with SLO/SLA definitions and tracking.
  • Proficiency in SQL for investigative queries, reporting, and dashboarding across operational datasets.
  • Scripting and automation expertise (Python, Bash, or equivalent) to build tooling and automations that reduce manual toil.
  • Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) including networking, IAM, compute, and managed services.
  • Infrastructure-as-code knowledge (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) for reproducible environment management.
  • Observability toolkit experience: metrics/logs/tracing with Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, ELK/Opensearch, or Splunk.
  • Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and related operational concerns (health checks, pod disruption budgets).
  • CI/CD toolchain experience (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, ArgoCD) and deployment strategies (canary, blue/green).
  • Experience with ticketing and incident platforms (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, ServiceNow, Jira Service Desk).
  • Knowledge of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, load balancers, VPCs) and service-to-service communication issues.
  • Basic security and compliance awareness, vulnerability remediation workflows, and support for audit activities.
  • Data analysis and visualization skills (Looker, Tableau, Grafana) to produce operational dashboards and executive reporting.
  • Familiarity with backup/restore, DR planning and execution for production systems.

Soft Skills

  • Exceptional troubleshooting and analytical thinking with strong attention to detail under pressure.
  • Clear and empathetic communicator: able to translate technical impact to non-technical stakeholders and executives.
  • Proven collaborator who can coordinate cross-functional teams during incidents, releases, and planning.
  • Strong ownership mentality: drives issues to resolution and follows through on process improvements.
  • Adaptable and proactive learner comfortable with evolving systems, tools, and priorities.
  • Time management and prioritization skills in fast-paced, on-call-driven environments.
  • Ability to write clear runbooks, post-mortems, and technical documentation suitable for both engineers and operations teams.
  • Customer-focused mindset with a commitment to operational excellence and reliability.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Mathematics, or related technical field; OR commensurate professional experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related technical discipline.
  • Certifications such as AWS Certified SysOps/Developer, Google Cloud Professional - Cloud DevOps Engineer, or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Electrical or Systems Engineering
  • Data Science / Applied Mathematics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 2–6 years in platform operations, site reliability, DevOps, or systems engineering roles.

Preferred:

  • 3+ years of hands-on experience with cloud-native production systems, incident management, and automation.
  • Demonstrated track record of reducing incident volume or MTTR via automation, observability improvements, or process changes.
  • Experience supporting customer-facing SaaS platforms and collaborating with product, security, and customer success teams.
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