Incident Management (IM) Operations Lead - USC

Job Description: Incident Management (IM) Operations Lead

Location: Costa Mesa, Orange County, California.

Work Model: Onsite presence from office is required 5 days a week.

24/7 Operations Connected Car & Telematics

Role Summary

We are seeking an Incident Management (IM) Operations Lead for a 24/7 operations program supporting a key player in the automotive industry's connected car space. This role will lead an onsite offshore IM function, act as the single point of accountability for all incidents and active outages which occur during onsite business hours and ensure adherence to contractual SLAs. The IM Operations Lead will orchestrate end-to-end incident handling from anomaly detection to bridge initiation, stakeholder communications, resolution, and post-incident governance with a strong background in Telematics and Connected Vehicle systems (including Remote Services).

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor the Incident Management team in an onsite offshore operating model; establish clear handoffs and coverage to support 24/7 operations.
• Own and drive the lifecycle of every major incident/outage (not a shift-based support engineer role), ensuring rapid triage, containment, and resolution.
• Serve as the primary point of contact (POC) for all IM matters including executive escalations maintaining authoritative situational awareness across platforms.
• Accountable for all IM SLAs (MTTD, MTTA, MTTR, communication SLAs); ensure measurement, reporting, and continuous improvement.
• Should be proficient in handling the incidents ranging from high priority ones (P1, P2) to the low priority incidents (P3, P4).
• Initiate and run incident bridges/war rooms; coordinate cross-functional responders (application, infrastructure, network, OEM partners, and third parties).
• Oversee proactive detection through data monitoring tools (Dynatrace, Datadog, Grafana, MaxGauge) and ensure alert quality, runbooks, and signal-to-noise optimization.
• Establish and enforce SOPs for incident declaration, severity classification, response roles and decision logs.
• Drive disciplined stakeholder communications: timely updates to product, operations, OEM/customer contacts, leadership, and impacted regions; maintain comms cadence and channels.
• Ensure post-incident governance: facilitate RCA, document contributing causes, corrective and preventive actions (CAPA), and circulate the RCA across teams for sign-off.
• Partner with Problem Management to track and eradicate recurring issues; maintain problem backlog, KEDB (Known Error Database), and follow-through on remediation.
• Define and maintain IM dashboards, KPIs, and executive reports; present weekly/monthly service reviews with trend analysis and action plans.
• Collaborate with Product/Engineering to influence reliability roadmaps (resiliency patterns, observability, capacity, release safeguards).
• Ensure compliance with information security, data privacy, and OEM contractual obligations during incident handling and communications.
• Continuously refine IM playbooks, runbooks, and training; conduct simulations/game days and readiness audits across onsite offshore teams.

Domain Expertise: Telematics & Connected Car

• Hands-on knowledge of Telematics Control Unit (TCU), eSIM/OTA provisioning, backend telematics platforms, and data flows between vehicle, cloud, and mobile apps.
• Familiarity with Remote Services (e.g., remote lock/unlock, start/stop, charge control, climate pre-conditioning), geo-services, and safety/assist features.
• Understanding of service dependencies: identity/auth, messaging, device management, CAN bus signals, firmware/OTA update orchestration, and regional compliance.
• Experience coordinating incidents across OEM partners, Tier-1 suppliers, cloud providers, and customer support operations.

Required Qualifications

• 8 12+ years in Operations/Service Management with 4+ years leading Incident Management in large-scale, 24/7 environments.
• Demonstrated experience running bridges for P1/P0 incidents; proven incident commander skills and decision-making under pressure.
• Strong background in Telematics/Connected Car domain and vehicle remote services concepts.
• Proficiency with observability and monitoring tools: Dynatrace, Datadog, Grafana, MaxGauge (dashboards, alerting, traces, logs).
• Expertise in IM processes: detection triage severity assignment bridge initiation stakeholder updates resolution post-incident RCA.
• Working knowledge of ITIL practices (Incident, Problem, Change, Service Level Management).
• Should have good hands on experience in using tools like JIRA, Confluence, Jenkins, XMatters.
• Excellent communication (written/verbal), executive presence, and stakeholder management across onsite offshore teams.
• Ability to analyze telemetry and time-series data to drive root cause hypotheses and corrective actions.
• Experience defining SLAs/SLOs and building KPI dashboards (MTTD/MTTA/MTTR, incident volume, recurrence, comms SLA, customer impact).

Tools & Technologies

• Dynatrace, Datadog, Grafana, MaxGauge (APM, logs, metrics, dashboards).
• Incident & Comms: ticketing (Jira/ServiceNow), chat/bridge tools (Teams/Zoom), status pages.
• Data: time-series analysis, log aggregation, tracing, alerting policies and noise reduction.

Education & Experience

• Bachelor s degree in engineering, Computer Science, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).

Location & Travel

• Location: Costa Mesa, Orange County, California.
• Work Model: Onsite presence from office is required 5 days a week.