Senior Manager, SRE and ITSM Operations

Job Description Love building Run capabilities from the ground up? Zendesk is looking for a Senior Manager to lead our unified SRE and ITSM Operations team—someone who can set strategy, drive process maturity, and serve as the interface between Run, business stakeholders, and platform teams. This role is the cornerstone of our MVP organization, establishing core capabilities, incident coverage, and basic observability across our 70 CIO-owned applications. The Role The Sr Manager, SRE & ITSM Operations will lead the centralized Run function for Zendesk’s internal IT services. You will own the ITSM roadmap, stakeholder engagement, prioritization, and KPIs—overseeing Observability & Monitoring, Incident Management & Response, Reliability Engineering & Automation, Change Management, Problem Management & Process Governance, and IT Asset Management (CMDB). You will build and scale a hybrid SRE ITSM model that balances engineering rigor with process governance. This is a leadership role that combines strategic vision, people management, and cross-functional partnership. You will work with GES, AI & Automation, ES Product, platform owners, and domain teams to improve stability, reduce MTTR, and elevate the employee experience. What You’ll Do Lead the unified SRE & ITSM Operations team—set strategy, drive process maturity, and own Run outcomes. Own the ITSM roadmap—prioritize capabilities, define SLIs/SLOs and error budgets for core applications. Serve as the primary interface to business stakeholders, automation teams, and platform owners. Establish and maintain operating cadences—CAB, PIR/RCA, problem review, observability standards, and Run portfolio review. Build and develop the team—Observability, Incident Response, Change Management, Problem Management, and Asset Management. Drive KPIs: Tier 0 monitoring coverage, MTTA/MTTR, MTBI, recurrence reduction, FCR, and provisioning automation. Partner with Service Desk (Shared Services) on intake, routing, and escalation taxonomy. Define Build vs Run boundaries, handoff contracts, and selective transfer criteria for sustaining work. Champion the hybrid SRE model—incident swarming, blameless postmortems, error-budget-based change evolution. Contribute to organizational design—squad structure, career progression, and scaling from MVP to full coverage. What You Bring Required: 8 years of experience in IT Operations, SRE, ITSM, or Service Delivery; 3 years in a people leadership role. Preferred: Experience building or scaling Run/SRE/ITSM capabilities in a global, high-growth tech company. Strong working knowledge of ITIL and SRE principles; practical experience with hybrid SRE ITSM models. Experience leading observability, incident management, change management, or problem management functions. Familiarity with SaaS application portfolios (Salesforce, NetSuite, CPQ, integrations) and CIO-run scope. Excellent strategic, communication, and stakeholder management skills—able to influence across org boundaries. Data-driven mindset—comfortable with KPIs, error budgets, SLIs/SLOs, and operational reporting. Ability to balance governance with velocity—paved roads over bureaucracy. Understanding of Build vs Run boundaries, matrix operating models, and selective transfer criteria. Nice to Have ITIL 4 Managing Professional or SRE/DevOps leadership experience Experience with Zendesk Products, Datadog, Incident.I/O, or similar tooling Knowledge of Agile/DevOps practices and platform engineering Previous experience at a SaaS company with 50 internal applications How We’ll Measure Success Establishment of core Run capabilities and MVP staffing (13–16 resources). Improvement in MTTA/MTTR, MTBI, recurrence rate, and Tier 0 monitoring coverage. Adoption of ITSM processes (incident, problem, change) and observability standards. Demonstrated stakeholder satisfaction and cross-functional partnership. Team engagement, retention, and career progression within the Run function. ... (truncated, view full listing at source)