Help Desk Manager / Service Desk Lead
Location: Silver Spring, MD, Hybrid
Work Schedule: Monday through Friday, 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM ET
Customer: U.S. Food and Drug Administration, FDA CDER
Employment Type: Full-Time
Status: Contingent upon contract award
Position Overview
NeevSys is seeking an experienced Help Desk Manager to lead Tier 0, Tier 1, and Tier 2 support for the FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Office of Computational Science. The Service Desk supports scientific computing tools, clinical and nonclinical study-data platforms, analytical applications, training resources, and regulatory-review services used by FDA reviewers.
This role requires more than traditional desktop support. The selected candidate will lead service desk operations, manage ServiceNow queues and SLAs, maintain ticket quality, coordinate technical escalations, support scientific applications, oversee knowledge management, and prepare the team to support new tools and services.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead daily Tier 0, Tier 1, and Tier 2 Service Desk operations.
- Manage a team of Help Desk and application-support specialists.
- Monitor ServiceNow ticket volumes, priorities, backlog, aging, assignments, escalations, response times, and resolution performance.
- Review ticket documentation for accuracy, completeness, categorization, troubleshooting evidence, and appropriate routing.
- Coordinate support through ServiceNow, email, Microsoft Teams, telephone, remote sessions, and onsite assistance.
- Serve as the primary operational escalation point for high-priority and complex incidents.
- Coordinate Tier 3 support with FDA project teams, application owners, infrastructure teams, vendors, and technical specialists.
- Maintain ownership and customer communication through issue resolution and closure.
- Support scientific and regulatory applications used for clinical and nonclinical study-data processing, analysis, visualization, inspection support, and reviewer services.
- Lead troubleshooting of access, account, provisioning, study-data loading, application, connectivity, Java, analytical-tool, and workflow issues.
- Develop and maintain SOPs, troubleshooting guides, workflows, escalation procedures, knowledge articles, known-error records, and support plans.
- Apply knowledge-centered support practices to improve self-service and reduce repeat incidents.
- Monitor SLAs, first-contact resolution, reopen rates, routing accuracy, backlog health, customer satisfaction, and recurring incidents.
- Prepare operational dashboards, performance reports, trend analyses, and improvement recommendations.
- Support the onboarding of new tools and services by defining intake procedures, support tiers, escalation paths, training needs, knowledge resources, and readiness criteria.
- Train, coach, cross-train, and evaluate Service Desk staff.
- Maintain coverage during leave, absences, workload surges, releases, and high-priority events.
- Support FDA security, privacy, records-management, accessibility, and incident-reporting requirements.
- Participate in meetings at FDA White Oak and provide onsite support when requested.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Information Systems, Health Informatics, or a related field. Equivalent experience may be considered.
- Seven or more years of enterprise Service Desk, Help Desk, or application-support experience.
- Three or more years leading Tier 1 and Tier 2 support teams.
- Strong ServiceNow experience, including incident, request, assignment, escalation, SLA, backlog, and knowledge-management functions.
- Experience supporting business, clinical, scientific, regulatory, or data-intensive applications.
- Strong knowledge of ITIL-based incident, request, problem, knowledge, service-level, and escalation management.
- Experience managing multichannel support through phone, email, chat, remote support, and onsite assistance.
- Ability to collect diagnostic information, analyze symptoms, identify business impact, and route complex issues to the appropriate technical team.
- Experience developing SOPs, knowledge articles, troubleshooting guides, workflows, and operational reports.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Experience working with technical teams, analysts, scientists, project managers, vendors, and senior stakeholders.
- Ability to work onsite at FDA White Oak in Silver Spring, Maryland, as required.
- Ability to complete required Federal background investigation, suitability, PIV, security, privacy, and training requirements.
- U.S. work authorization.
Preferred Qualifications
- Previous FDA, NIH, CDC, HHS, or other Federal health experience.
- Experience in pharmaceutical, biotechnology, clinical research, healthcare, or life-sciences environments.
- Familiarity with clinical and nonclinical study data, including:
- CDISC SDTM
- SEND
- ADaM
- Define-XML
- Controlled terminology
- Study-data validation and reviewer guides
- Experience supporting SAS, SAS Studio, SAS Grid, JMP, or JMP Clinical.
- Familiarity with clinical safety analyses, such as adverse-event analysis, shift plots, Kaplan-Meier outputs, and Hy’s Law screening.
- Experience supporting scientific computing, data-processing, analytics, inspection, or regulatory-review platforms.
- Experience with Jira, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Excel, and reporting dashboards.
- Knowledge-Centered Service, KCS, experience.
- Experience onboarding new applications or services into a production Service Desk.
- ITIL 4 Foundation, ServiceNow CSA, HDI, KCS, SAS, JMP, or CDISC training or certification.
- Section 508 accessibility awareness.
Technical Environment
The Service Desk may support applications and services such as:
- Data Central
- CoreDF and DataFit
- Clinical and Nonclinical Services
- SAS/SARGE
- JMP and JMP Clinical
- SEND Explorer Warehouse
- Analysis Studio
- Analysis Toolbox
- Specialized Analysis Services
- Empirica Signal
- MAED
- CBITE@NEXUS
- OCS Connect
- Scientific computing resources
- Regulatory-review and inspection-support applications
Direct experience with every listed platform is not required. Candidates must demonstrate the ability to learn complex scientific applications, understand the user’s analytical objective, preserve scientific context during escalation, and lead structured resolution.
Success Measures
- SLA response and resolution performance
- First-contact resolution
- Accurate categorization and routing
- Reduced ticket backlog and aging
- Lower reopen and repeat-incident rates
- Timely Tier 3 escalation and follow-up
- Current SOPs and knowledge articles
- Staff readiness and cross-training
- Customer satisfaction
- Successful onboarding of new tools and services
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