Lead Cloud Operations Specialist

About the Team :
Incident Management Team, being part of the IT Service Management (ITSM), works cross-functionally with Global Services, Engineering, Cloud Hosting and Management on the effective delivery of UKGs Cloud SaaS offerings. About The Role: The Lead Cloud Operations Specialist provides day-day support for all the ongoing incidents and aligns with ITSMs strategic direction. Collaborating directly with the leadership team of ITSM, this position demands a high level of adaptability and quick thinking to achieve success. Responsibilities Include: Defining war room procedures, establishing communication channels, and ensuring all necessary resources (tools, data dashboards) are readily available for incident response Leading discussions during war room meetings, keeping the team focused, and ensuring everyone is aligned on priorities Capturing key decisions, actions taken, and lessons learned during the incident for future reference Take charge of the war room, leading the response team (engineers, support specialists) to diagnose, troubleshoot, and resolve issues impacting the SaaS product(s) Gathering and analyzing real-time data to understand the scope and impact of the incident Prioritizing actions, delegating tasks, and making critical decisions to resolve the incident efficiently Keeping stakeholders (internal and external) informed about the situation, progress, and estimated resolution time Enable the swift resolution of incidents, minimize downtime, and implement preventive measures to mitigate future issues Drive and facilitate resolution via Teams as an incident commander with excellent executive presence, communications, collaboration skills Collaborate and align with Leaders across Engineering, Sales, Corporate Comms, and Legal to accelerate incident resolution, remove blockers, and provide a high level of service to our customers Actively engage with cross functional teams to ensure Root Cause Analysis (RCAs) and Post Incident Review (PIRs) are complete, review remediation plans to identify areas for improvement, and socialize findings/insights Thrive under pressure with the ability to stay calm, handle conflict, and partner with other UKG teams to drive resolution Be able to coach other individual contributors in their professional development and serve as a role model Develop and monitor key metrics to understand incident trends, as well as operational resilience and readiness Develop and present business reviews on required cadences to executive leadership Basic Qualifications 5+ years of experience supporting a global 24x7x365 incident management team in an enterprise SaaS environment 5+ years of technical experience (Support, Services, IT, Engineering) at a tech company with exposure working with complex customer base 3+ years of working in a Cloud (AWS or GCP or Azure; GCP preferred) environment 3+ years of working in a scrum/agile/SRE environment (hands-on experience will be a PLUS) 3+ years of working in on-call support rotation model and PagerDuty experience 3+ years of working experience with Teams (integrations with PagerDuty and Service Now), Slack, Confluence and Share Point Subject matter expertise in incident management frameworks; awareness of industry standards and best practices Excellent problem-solving and decision-making skills to identify root causes and implement corrective actions Clear and concise communication skills at all levels (written and verbal) Demonstrated ability to collaborate, build credibility, and establish good working relationships with leaders across UKG to ensure solid partnership and alignment Willingness/Ability to work in shift-based rotation model in a larger enterprise incident management team Preferred Qualifications: Hands-on experience working with the following tools: JIRA, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Aha and their integrations (e.g. JIRA to PD integration/JIRA to Slack Integration) Experience working in an Agile technical environment Experience working in a Cloud environment