Technical Operations Center Manager

The posting

We are UMG, the Universal Music Group. We are the world’s leading music company. In everything we do, we are committed to artistry, innovation and entrepreneurship. We own and operate a broad array of businesses engaged in recorded music, music publishing, merchandising, and audiovisual content in more than 60 countries. We identify and develop recording artists and songwriters, and we produce, distribute and promote the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful music to delight and entertain fans around the world.

Job Summary:

We are UMG, the Universal Music Group. We are the world’s leading music company. In everything we do, we are committed to artistry, innovation and entrepreneurship. We own and operate a broad array of businesses engaged in recorded music, music publishing, merchandising, and audiovisual content in more than 60 countries. We identify and develop recording artists and songwriters, and we produce, distribute and promote the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful music to delight and entertain fans around the world.

As a Technical Operations Center (TOC) Manager, you will be one of three global managers operating in a "Follow the Sun" model, ensuring continuous 24/7 coverage and operational excellence across our technical infrastructure. This role is accountable for more than ticket throughput. It turns operational signals into measurable reliability outcomes by strengthening service ownership, leading disciplined incident response, reducing repeat failure and toil, and moving the organization toward proactive, increasingly automated operations. Your leadership will be crucial in facilitating seamless handoffs between shifts, maintaining high performance, and upholding and improving they systems and processes that create operational drag.

Job Functions:

Service Reliability & Operational Leadership

· Lead day-to-day operations for the Technical Operations Center, ensuring critical infrastructure and services are operated safely, reliably and consistently.

· Establish and maintain a service-centric operating rhythm covering service ownership, criticality, dependencies, SLOs/SLIs, incident trends, capacity, risk and operational readiness.

· Partner with service owners, engineering, cybersecurity, business technology teams and vendors to identify reliability risks before they become business-impacting incidents.

· Use observability, telemetry and service health data to improve detection, prioritization and decision-making.

· Maintain a regular operating review and publish a concise scorecard focused on outcomes rather than activity.

Major Incident Management & Swarming

· Lead or sponsor response to major incidents, acting as Incident Commander or ensuring the appropriate command structure is in place.

· Establish clear incident roles, escalation triggers, communication standards and decision rights for high-severity events.

· Make swarming repeatable through shared queues, structured triage-ready information and timely engagement of the right technical and business partners.

· Coordinate internal teams and third-party providers through restoration, stakeholder communication and service validation.

· Ensure blameless postmortems convert incident learning into prioritized problem-management, reliability and prevention work.

Problem Management, Toil Reduction & Automation

· Maintain a ranked backlog of repeat incidents, operational toil, alert noise and manual work, with owners and measurable outcomes.

· Drive the conversion of repeatable procedures into versioned runbooks, scripts, workflows, automation and self-service capabilities.

· Apply AI-assisted triage and knowledge discovery where appropriate, with human oversight, security controls, auditability and clear escalation paths.

· Improve the quality, findability and lifecycle management of operational knowledge, including runbooks, known-error records, as-builts and shift documentation.

· Track automation adoption and toil hours avoided using the results to redirect capacity toward reliability engineering and service improvement.

Change, Release & Operational Readiness

· Strengthen risk-tiered change practices, including pre-checks, peer review, testing evidence, implementation plans, monitoring and rollback readiness.

· Partner with engineering and delivery teams to shift operational readiness earlier in the lifecycle, including supportability, observability, runbooks and ownership before release.

· Analyze change-related incidents and failure patterns leading corrective actions that improve change success and reduce recovery time.

· Support paved-road standards and a transparent exception process for common infrastructure, cloud, identity, network and systems patterns.

Global Coordination & Follow-the-Sun Operations

· Facilitate structured handoffs between global teams, ensuring the incoming shift receives current service health, active incidents, risks, decisions, next actions and escalation needs.

· Maintain consistent severity, response, handoff, change and review practices across regions while respecting local context and coverage requirements.

· Build strong working relationships across time zones, technical domains, business units and strategic vendors.

· Participate in a rotating global coverage and escalation model, including occasional out-of-hours or weekend coverage when required. The schedule should support sustainable coverage rather than routine weekend office attendance.

People Leadership & Capability Building

· Lead, coach and develop Technical Operations Center specialists, creating a culture of accountability, learning, collaboration and continuous improvement.

· Set clear expectations for performance, incident leadership, documentation, operational discipline and customer experience.

· Hire, onboard and develop talent while building role-based learning paths and cross-training plans for critical domains.

· Establish resilient coverage with documented SME and backup relationships, reducing key-person dependency.

Job Requirements:

Skills/Abilities

· Deep technical knowledge in infrastructure operations, site reliability, platform operations or related disciplines.

· Ability to assess impact, prioritize under pressure, communicate clearly and make sound decisions during high-severity events.

· Experience with service ownership, observability, SLOs/SLIs, operational readiness, runbooks and reliability metrics.

· Experience reducing operational toil through scripting, workflow automation, self-service or similar engineering practices.

· Working knowledge of cloud, identity, network, systems and/or enterprise infrastructure operations.

· Ability to build trust across engineering, security, business technology, vendors and geographically distributed teams.

· Commitment to blameless learning, continuous improvement and inclusive people leadership.

Experience

· Eight or more years of progressive experience in infrastructure operations, site reliability, platform operations, IT service management or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

· Three or more years leading technical teams, major incident response, operational programs or cross-functional reliability initiatives.

· Demonstrated experience operating mission-critical infrastructure or applications in a complex, globally distributed environment.

· Strong working knowledge of incident, problem, change, service-level and knowledge-management practices.

· Experience leading a follow-the-sun operating model or global shift handoff process is preferred.

Preferred Qualifications

· Experience with AI-assisted operations, event correlation, anomaly detection or intelligent triage, with appropriate governance and human review.

· Experience implementing or improving a service catalog, SLO framework, error-budget practices or reliability scorecard.

· Experience with ITSM, observability, automation/orchestration and knowledge-management platforms.

· ITIL, SRE, cloud, automation or related certification.

· Experience leading a follow-the-sun operating model or global shift handoff process.

Education

· Bachelor’s degree in information technology or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

· Industry-standard IT certifications are desirable; ITIL, SRE, cloud or automation certifications are a plus.

Perks Playlist:

Join an entrepreneurial, global organization where authenticity, boldness, creativity, connection, drive, and insight aren’t just values—they’re how we work every day. Here are some of the ways we support you along the way (and just a few of the benefits we offer):

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Including 100% coverage for out-patient in-network mental health services
• Fertility coverage for eligible medical plan participants
• Wellbeing reimbursements for fitness classes, spa treatments, meal services, travel, and so much more (up to $720/year)
• Student Loan Repayment Assistance and Tuition Reimbursement
• 401(k) with 100% immediate vesting on the first 5% of your contributions, plus an additional UMG contribution

A variety of ways to prioritize much-needed time away from work including:

• Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO) for exempt employees
• 3-weeks PTO for non-exempt employees
• 2-weeks paid Winter Break
• 10 Company Holidays (including Juneteenth and Wellbeing Day)
• Summer Fridays (between Memorial Day and Labor Day)
• Generous paid parental leave for every type of parent

Check out our full overview of benefits on the Perks Playlist page of the career site.

Disclaimer: This job description only provides an overview of job responsibilities that are subject to change.

Universal Music Group is an Equal Opportunity Employer

We are an E-Verify employer in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah.

Please note, UMG is not enrolled in E-Verify in California and New York, and cannot support employment of candidates whose employer must enroll in E-Verify, for example candidates on STEM-OPT.

For more information, please click on the following links.

E-Verify Participation Poster: English / Spanish

E-Verify Right to Work Poster: English | Spanish

Job Category:

Technology

Salary Range:

$119,845 - $159,145

The actual base salary offered depends on a variety of factors, which may include, as applicable, the qualifications of the individual applicant for the position, years of relevant experience, specific and unique skills, level of education attained, certifications or other professional licenses held, and the location in which the applicant lives and/or from which they will be performing the job. All candidates are encouraged to apply.