Operations Lead📣 Job Ad

About the Role

Oivan is seeking an experienced Operations Lead to join our team in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This full-time role is central to ensuring the operational excellence and continuous improvement of critical platforms, specifically Sakani and Ejar. The ideal candidate will possess 2-5 years of relevant experience and will be responsible for leading day-to-day operations, service delivery, and platform reliability.

Key Responsibilities

The Operations Lead will oversee a broad range of operational activities, ensuring high standards of service and system performance. Core responsibilities include:

• Leading and managing operational support for the Sakani and Ejar platforms.
• Ensuring platform availability, stability, performance, and reliability across all environments.
• Driving continuous service improvement initiatives and optimizing operational processes.
• Leading major incident management, coordinating resolution efforts, and conducting Root Cause Analysis (RCA).
• Overseeing production deployments, releases, and maintenance activities, ensuring operational readiness and compliance with change management processes.
• Leading Disaster Recovery (DR) planning, testing, and execution to meet Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) targets.
• Acting as the primary operational contact for business and technical stakeholders, facilitating governance and service review meetings.
• Managing vendor performance against agreed Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and coordinating activities with third-party providers.
• Monitoring platform performance, utilization, and capacity trends, identifying bottlenecks, and planning future scalability.
• Ensuring compliance with organizational policies, security standards, and regulatory requirements, supporting audits and mitigating operational risks.

Operational Focus Areas

This role requires a comprehensive understanding and hands-on leadership across several critical operational domains:

• Operations Management: Overseeing production and non-production environments, monitoring operational KPIs, SLAs, and service health metrics.
• Incident & Problem Management: Managing incident escalations across various teams and tracking recurring issues for long-term solutions.
• Release & Change Management: Reviewing implementation and rollback plans, ensuring compliance with governance standards.
• Platform & DevOps Operations: Collaborating with DevOps teams to enhance automation, reliability, and supporting Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity: Maintaining operational runbooks and recovery procedures, coordinating periodic DR drills.
• Stakeholder Management: Coordinating with internal teams and external vendors, preparing and presenting operational reports and executive updates.
• Vendor & Service Management: Handling escalations and ensuring timely issue resolution with third-party providers.
• Performance & Capacity Management: Identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks, planning future capacity requirements.
• Security, Risk & Compliance: Supporting security audits, risk assessments, and compliance initiatives, tracking and mitigating operational risks.

Key Performance Indicators

Success in this role will be measured against specific operational metrics, including:

• Platform Availability ≥ ***
• SLA Compliance ≥ 95%.
• Change Success Rate ≥ 98%.
• Reduction in Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR).
• Successful Disaster Recovery testing and execution.
• Operational Risk Reduction.
• Stakeholder and Customer Satisfaction.

Reporting Structure and Scope

The Operations Lead reports directly to the IT Operations Manager / Head of Technology Operations. The scope of this role encompasses operational governance, service reliability, incident management, platform operations, disaster recovery readiness, and overall service delivery across the designated platforms.

Required Experience and Skills

Candidates for this position should demonstrate a strong background in IT operations and platform management. Key requirements include:

• A minimum of 2-5 years of experience in an operations leadership or senior operational role.
• Proven ability to lead day-to-day operations and manage complex service delivery.
• Strong understanding of incident, problem, release, and change management processes.
• Experience with DevOps practices, automation, and supporting modern infrastructure technologies such as Kubernetes and cloud platforms.
• Demonstrated expertise in disaster recovery planning and business continuity.
• Excellent stakeholder and vendor management skills, with the ability to coordinate across diverse teams.
• Familiarity with security standards, risk assessment, and compliance initiatives.