Director, Engineering Operations

The Role and What You’ll Do:

The Director, Engineering Operations (Core) is a senior technology leader accountable for the operational excellence, reliability, and efficiency of Core platforms. You will lead run-the-business (RTB) operations, incident and change management, release governance, and quality guardrails. You'll partner closely with Technical Product, Business Operations, Security & Compliance, and Platform Services teams as well as with the Director, Solutions Architecture and Delivery (Core). You will drive AI adoption to streamline processes and outputs, establish comprehensive observability across applications and infrastructure, and ensure 24/7 reliability and availability during major event windows with elevated risk and traffic.

The Director of Engineering Operations for the Core business will:

• Own end-to-end engineering operations across RTB: intake, triage, prioritization, change/release governance, incident response, and post-mortems

• Drive AI-enabled operational efficiency and automation across the SDLC, STLC, and SSDLC

• Establish comprehensive observability with golden signals, SLIs/SLOs, anomaly detection, auto-remediation, and cost/capacity insights

• Define and uphold SLOs for critical domains and guest journeys (checkout, inventory sync, fulfillment, payments)

• Standardize Datadog logs, metrics, traces, and RUM/synthetics to accelerate detection and root-cause analysis

• Continuously measure and improve delivery performance through DORA metrics

• Enforce release discipline: balanced planned vs. unplanned releases, readiness criteria, rollback playbooks, and event blackout windows

• Support major events with elevated operational rigor: dry runs, performance testing, strict change controls, enhanced monitoring, and clear comms protocols

• Partner with Business Operations, Technical Product, and Solutions Architecture to maintain a single, aligned view of priorities, dependencies, and SLAs

• Lead post-event and incident post-mortems to drive continuous improvement of SOPs, runbooks, response protocols, and reliability

• Mature incident and security response in close partnership with TechOps and Security & Compliance (IRP/SIRP)

• Continuously reduce technical debt across performance, security, and maintainability

• Foster learning, blameless culture with KPI/OKR-driven improvements and transparent communication

• Publish clear weekly and monthly operational health and stability reporting

You Have These:

• 10+ years in software engineering operations, site reliability engineering, platform or DevOps leadership supporting 24x7 systems

• Experience leading and improving team performance measuring against DORA metrics

• Proven track record leading incident response and postmortems, with measurable reductions in MTTD, MTTI, and MTTR and decreases in MTBF

• Hands-on experience implementing observability and SLO/SLI frameworks

• Strong background with CI/CD, trunk-based development, automated testing strategies, and release orchestration

• Security-by-design mindset, experience with IRP/SIRP operations and DevSecOps practices

• Excellent stakeholder management; effective and concise communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences

• Ability to lead and execute through ambiguity and high-demand, high-stakes events

We’d Love If You Also Have These:

• Experience with Datadog, feature flagging platforms, and progressive delivery

• History of operating platforms supporting large-scale events, ticketing, payments, or high-traffic commerce

• Experience applying AI in technical operations and/or software delivery

• Background in capacity planning, performance engineering, and chaos testing

• Familiarity with regulated environments and audit processes; comfortable publishing operational evidence and controls

• Experience shaping org-level SDLC, STLC, and SSDLC standards across internal and partner teams

How We Work:

On Location is at the center of sports and entertainment and is a largely relationship-based business. To foster an environment of collaboration, develop our future talent, and build on relationships across leadership, peers, and teams, we work from the office 1-2 days per week for those who are based out of cities where there are available team offices/hubs. We see immeasurable value internally and throughout the core of the businesses we support.

Don’t meet every single requirement? We are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

Get to know us better:

https://onlocationexp.com/about