Cloud Services Operations Manager

What part will you play? If you are looking for a place where you can make a meaningful difference, you have found it. Because, at Markel, the work you do gives people the confidence to move forward and seize opportunities. If you enjoy technology, are team-oriented and a servant leader, you will find your fit amongst our global community of optimists and problem-solvers. We are always pushing each other to go further because we believe that when we realize our potential, we can help others reach theirs. Come Join us and play your part in something special!

This position will be responsible for managing a team of IT employees possessing varied experience levels. This position participates in the planning and managing of activities within the assigned business unit/area.

Responsibilities:

Cloud Service Operations Support Manager is responsible for ensuring excellence in service delivery, support, systems availability, and security in support of business objectives. As the Operations leader you will have the opportunity to work in a fast-paced environment, solve complex problems, lead our Azure Cloud Ops support capability, and grow together with the rapidly developing business. Together with the leader of Cloud & Innovation Engineering, you will be responsible for building, operating, and continuously improving hosting & cloud operations capabilities that support Markel’s Cloud enterprise. You will be responsible for ensuring delivery of high-quality services and availability by providing team leadership, management, and oversite of incident & service request response, ensuring compliance and SLA adherence. Responsibility and ownership for providing follow the sun support and management of on-call services, scheduling, and alerting solutions. The position will lead and provide management of the infrastructure improvement projects, recovery exercises, and architectural oversight.

As the Cloud Services Operations Manager, you will play a crucial role in ensuring the successful operation of our cloud environments. You will lead a team of experts in Azure, and other cloud technologies to provide secure, compliant, and efficient cloud solutions. Your responsibilities will include strategizing, optimizing, and ensuring cloud health compliance while maintaining a secure baseline and supporting cost-saving initiatives.

Duties and Responsibilities

Provide team leadership and management over Service Desk queue and provide guidance over incident triage and first response.

Manage On-call scheduling, rotation, and provide escalation management for the team.

Oversee environment monitoring response and remediation, Provide oversight and insightful leadership to the team and work toward systems integration and automation within the monitoring alerting and documentation environments.

Develop standards of operations and procedures for day-to-day running of the environments ensuring all compliance with all company policies. Establish and enforce appropriate IT policies, processes, and procedures, aligning with industry best practices.

Enforce, complete, and comply with all data protection policies and processes such as running disaster recovery tests and processes, ensuring compliance with system patching and vulnerability management.

Ensure security is a key priority for all Cloud Services, driving timely patching and strong operational processes that protect the enterprise.

Work closely with Cloud Service Owner in planning and delivering within the Cloud budget, including forecasting to roadmap that ensures delivery of key objectives and compliance.

Define and manage to establish Service Level Agreement(s) for all deployed infrastructure services in Azure

Implement an effective team structure that optimizes the delivery capability and output of the Cloud Services Operations IT team, operating the team as a shared services organization capable of delivering solutions across the business.

Collaborate effectively across all internal and external service providers to resolve Cloud related issues in a timely manner and ensure adequate capacity to support business needs.

Operate with efficiency and effectiveness, establishing and implementing industry standards and best practices following ITIL Processes.

Recruit, motivate and develop a customer focused team; establish a culture that embraces responsibility and accountability, values teamwork, encourages diversity, and delivers performance-based outcomes.

Collaborate effectively across all internal and external service providers to resolve Cloud related issues in a timely manner and ensure adequate capacity to support business needs.

Lead by example in inclusive behaviors, teamwork, partnership, and diversity.

Build an environment of trust and collaboration within Technology Enablement and the entire IT organization modeling Markel’s core values.

Provide leadership, coaching and direction, creating goals and standards of performance according to established HR policies, guidelines, and processes.

Develop a detailed plan to facilitate cross-training of the Operations team, implementing a sustainable model that ensures continuous knowledge exchange and competency development.

Maintain production operations according to business expectations with emphasis on security, availability, and scalability, in Cloud.

Collaborate with Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity teams to understand business requirements and architect solutions to match.

Skills and Experience

Bachelor’s degree preferred and/or minimum 10 years of Information Technology (IT) experience in developing, configuring, deploying. and maintaining Cloud solutions as well as 5 years of IT management experience.

Excellent working knowledge with Cloud IaaS / PaaS / SaaS solutions (example Microsoft Azure).

Experience with monitoring, alerting, configuration management and automation tools. Working knowledge of response and account ability processes within ITSM tool like ServiceNow.

Strong knowledge of cloud service architecture, operations, and components with Azure.

Demonstrated experience instituting and utilizing ITIL practices (example, Incident, Service Request, Change, Problem, Knowledge, Configuration (CMDB), and Availability, Asset & Capacity management) to deliver and manage quality IT services.

Extensive IT leadership experience, including demonstrated examples of management through influence and collaboration in complex, multi-site global environments. Significant experience successfully leading geographically dispersed and diverse teams, building a culture of ownership, responsibility, and accountability.

Highly motivated and entrepreneurial; hands on leader with a “can do” attitude who drives the same within his/her team.

Excellent communication and facilitation skills that have been leveraged to drive change and successfully deliver significant IT programs. Ability to communicate across all levels of the organization, technical and non-technical audiences, to convey complex IT information in a clear and concise fashion.

Strong experience in project planning and execution and economic aspects of Cloud services infrastructure management and lifecycle.

A delivery focused leader who has demonstrated the ability to establish technical direction, collaborate across global teams and drive action through influence to deliver critical infrastructure projects/programs while ensuring continuous operation.

Previous experience establishing internal continuous improvement activities to drive efficiency, manage/reduce costs, and improve service. Experience leveraging shared IT services, internal or external, to drive cost effective service delivery and support.

Knowledge of agile practices in an enterprise infrastructure environment is highly preferred!

Qualifications:

Required Technical Skills:

5-10 years' experience in information technology service/product management leadership.

2+ years of experience in cloud operations management with strong solid understanding of Microsoft Azure cloud platform, IaaS, PaaS workloads, cost management assessments, Hybrid infrastructure, and Secure configuration.

3 to 5 years IT Service Management, ITIL framework, customer experience, and service level management.

Soft Skills Required:

A servant leader and role model with outstanding planning, analytical, decision-making, organization, communication, and teamwork skills. As well as solid enterprise infrastructure knowledge with the ability to influence others and build consensus.

Accountable for supporting enterprise priorities and able to make difficult and quick decisions daily with incomplete information for all services across the journey.

An empowering and creative leader with an experimental approach and a demonstrated willingness to learn and develop others.

Must be authorized to work in the U.S., and not require sponsorship now or in the future.

Who we are:

Markel Group (NYSE – MKL) a fortune 500 company with over 60 offices in 20+ countries, is a holding company for insurance, reinsurance, specialist advisory and investment operations around the world.

We’re all about people We win together We strive for better

We enjoy the everyday We think further

What’s in it for you:

In keeping with the values of the Markel Style, we strive to support our employees in living their lives to the fullest at home and at work.

We offer competitive benefit programs that help meet our diverse and changing environment as well as support our employees’ needs at all stages of life.

All full-time employees have the option to select from multiple health, dental and vision insurance plan options and optional life, disability, and AD&D insurance.

We also offer a 401(k) with employer match contributions, an Employee Stock Purchase Plan, PTO, corporate holidays and floating holidays, parental leave.

Markel offers hybrid working schedules of 3 days in the office and 2 days remote.

Are you ready to play your part?

Choose ‘Apply Now’ to fill out our short application, so that we can find out more about you.

The base salary offered for the successful candidate will be based on compensable factors such as job-relevant education, job-relevant experience, training, licensure, demonstrated competencies, geographic location, and other factors.

Caution: Employment scams

Markel is aware of employment-related scams where scammers will impersonate recruiters by sending fake job offers to those actively seeking employment in order to steal personal information. Frequently, the scammer will reach out to individuals who have posted their resume online. These "job offers" include convincing offer letters and frequently ask for confidential personal information. Therefore, for your safety, please note that:

All legitimate job postings with Markel will be posted on No other URL should be trusted for job Markel Group Careers.

All legitimate communications with Markel recruiters will come from Markel.com email addresses.

We would also ask that you please report any job employment scams related to Markel to .

Markel is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate or allow discrimination on the basis of any protected characteristic. This includes race; color; sex; religion; creed; national origin or place of birth; ancestry; age; disability; affectional or sexual orientation; gender expression or identity; genetic information, sickle cell trait, or atypical hereditary cellular or blood trait; refusal to submit to genetic tests or make genetic test results available; medical condition; citizenship status; pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions; marital status, civil union status, domestic partnership status, familial status, or family responsibilities; military or veteran status, including unfavorable discharge from military service; personal appearance, height, or weight; matriculation or political affiliation; expunged juvenile records; arrest and court records where prohibited by applicable law; status as a victim of domestic or sexual violence; public assistance status; order of protection status; status as a smoker or nonsmoker; membership or activity in local commissions; the use or nonuse of lawful products off employer premises during non-work hours; declining to attend meetings or participate in communications about religious or political matters; or any other classification protected by applicable law.

Should you require any accommodation through the application process, please send an e-mail to the .

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