Sr. IT Support Engineer

The Sr. IT Operations Engineer is the technical authority for the run-and-support layer of internal IT - the senior individual contributor who sets the operations and support standards, the runbooks, and the service-desk operating model that operations engineers and support technicians run to, owns the hardest operational escalations and the command of major incidents, and drives the monitoring, automation, and tooling that keep daily IT running reliably as the company grows. Core ownership is how internal IT operates as a service - the service-desk operating model (tiering, SLAs, escalation, on-call), the monitoring and alerting standard, the operational-automation program, the execution standards for the patch and backup and access-request programs, incident and problem operations, and the reliability, capacity, and continuous-improvement of the whole run-layer. This is a senior individual-contributor seat reporting to an IT Manager or Head of IT, with technical-decision ownership of how operations are run, a mentoring relationship to the operations engineers and the support staff, and a partnership - not an ownership - relationship to the systems and security specialists. It is not an IT Manager (this seat sets the operating standard and mentors, but owns no people, no budget, and no vendor contracts - it recommends and escalates those up), not the base IT Operations Engineer who runs and supports the estate and resolves the queue to the standard (this seat sets that standard and the operating model, takes the escalations that exceed the base seat, and drives the automation), not the Senior IT Systems Engineer who owns the systems architecture and the deep builds and design (this seat owns how the estate is run and supported, and defers the architecture and the deep systems change to that track), and not the Senior IT Engineer whose seniority is generalist breadth across the whole surface (this seat is the operations / service-management run-layer specifically). Performance is visible in whether the run-layer stays reliable and fast as the company scales - the service levels held, the major incidents commanded and learned from, the toil automated away, and the operations bench that levels up. What separates great from average at this altitude is turning a talent for firefighting into an operating model that runs without the fire: a service-desk operating model that gives every request a consistent response, monitoring that catches an incident before users file it, a major-incident process rehearsed so it runs the same way at 2am, operational automation that retires whole classes of manual work, a problem-management loop that turns every serious incident into a permanent fix, and a bench of operations engineers and technicians who operate at a higher bar. A mediocre senior becomes the indispensable pager everyone escalates to - a single point of failure who is too buried in incidents to ever get ahead of them, and who quietly reaches into the systems architecture they do not own. A great one is the person who makes internal IT run like a well-instrumented service, holds the line between running the estate and designing it, and is measured by a run-layer that stays reliable when they are asleep.