Role Overview: The L1 Lead will oversee the daily operations of the Service Desk supporting the A2P SMS platform. This role involves leading a team of L1 engineers, managing incident flow, ensuring SLA adherence, acting as the first point of escalation, and coordinating with L2/L3 engineering teams. The Lead also ensures high-quality communication, process compliance, and continuous improvement of monitoring and ticket-handling practices.
Key Responsibilities: Team Leadership Operations Management:
- Lead a team of L1 Service Desk engineers across 247 rotational shifts.
- Manage shift rosters, attendance, handover updates, and ensure complete shift coverage.
- Provide mentoring, coaching, and on-the-job guidance to L1 team members.
- Conduct daily stand-ups to highlight incidents, ongoing issues, and priorities.
Incident, Request Escalation Management:
- Ensure timely response, triage, and resolution of support tickets raised via phone, email, or monitoring alerts.
- Validate ticket quality before escalating to L2 engineers (complete logs, screenshots, summary, timelines, troubleshooting done).
- Act as the first point of escalation for high-severity or customer-impacting incidents.
- Monitor SLA, FTR (First Time Resolution), and response KPIs to maintain service quality.
Monitoring Platform Oversight:
- Ensure continuous monitoring of applications, dashboards, alerts, and infrastructure health.
- Review alerts generated by monitoring tools (Viz: Grafana, ELK) and ensure quick L1 response and appropriate escalation to L2.
- Drive proactive monitoring practices to reduce incident recurrence.
Client Communication Stakeholder Coordination:
- Serve as the primary communication bridge between L1 support and internal/external stakeholders during incidents.
- Prepare incident summaries, status updates, and shift reports with clear timelines and actions taken.
- Maintain professional, transparent, and timely communication with customers.
Process Compliance Documentation:
- Ensure strict adherence to SOPs, runbooks, and ticket-handling guidelines.
- Identify gaps in procedures and propose improvements in coordination with engineering teams.
- Review and enhance Knowledge Base articles (internal public).
- Drive the creation and continuous improvement of SOPs, ensuring updated workflows, best practices, and troubleshooting steps are proactively developed, reviewed, and implemented.
Reporting Continuous Improvement:
- Generate daily/weekly operational reports on ticket metrics, SLA compliance, incident trends, and team performance.
- Identify recurring issues and collaborate with L2/L3 teams to drive problem management.
- Conduct periodic refresher training for L1 engineers on ticketing, communication, and troubleshooting skills.
Minimum Qualifications Skills: Technical Skills:
- Experience supporting mission-critical, high-availability platforms.
- Good understanding of REST APIs, basic networking concepts, Linux/Windows OS, and general application behavior.
- Familiarity with monitoring dashboards/tools incident management systems (Jira, ServiceNow, etc. ).
- Well-versed with the ITIL framework (Incident Management Customer Communications, and Escalations).
- Ability to perform basic troubleshooting and guide the L1 team effectively.
Leadership Soft Skills:
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills; fluency in English.
- Strong problem-solving and analytical thinking capability.
- Ability to take ownership, drive resolution, and make informed decisions in real time.
- Experience working autonomously and managing multiple incidents in a high-pressure environment.
- Ability to coordinate between L1 team, customers, and technical teams.
- Ensure strict adherence to Ticket SLAs through effective monitoring and timely action.
- Oversee incident detection and coordinate resolution efforts with L2 and L3 teams to minimise impact.
- Identify process gaps proactively and drive continuous improvements across Service Desk operations.
- Ensure accurate, timely, and transparent SLA reporting for internal and client stakeholders.
- Enhance overall ticket resolution quality and efficiency within the Global Service Desk team.
- Improvement in ticket resolution by the GSD Team.
Experience Certification:
- 45 years of overall Service Desk / Application Support experience.
- Minimum 12 years in a Team Lead or Shift Lead role (mandatory).
- Experience managing 247 support operations preferred.
- ITIL v4 Certification (Preferred).
Interview Process
