Product Operations Lead (Sydney, Australia)

About the Role

As the Product Operations Lead, you will serve as the ultimate first line of defence for our Production environment. In this high-impact role, you will bridge the gap between technical operations, customer-facing teams, and executive leadership. You will be responsible for ensuring maximum system uptime, orchestrating incident responses, and building a world-class L1 support capability.

This is not just a technical monitoring role. It requires exceptional emotional intelligence, sharp communication skills, and the political acumen to navigate complex organizational structures during high-pressure situations.

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership & L1 Management

• Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing Tier 1 (L1) Product Operations team.
• Establish clear operational playbooks, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and escalation matrices.
• Define and track team KPIsincluding Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA), Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), and first-contact resolution rates.
• Foster a culture of continuous learning, ensures the L1 team has the training and access required to triage complex infrastructure and application issues.

Environment Safeguarding & Synthetic Monitoring

• Own the proactive health of the Production environment, serving as the primary gatekeeper against customer-impacting outages.
• Design, implement, and maintain comprehensive synthetic monitoring suites to simulate end-to-end user journeys and detect regressions before users do.
• Collaborate with DevOps and SRE teams to optimize ing thresholds, reducing fatigue while maximizing critical coverage.

Crisis Communication & Stakeholder Management

• Translate technical chaos into calm, clear, and business-focused updates for the CTO and executive leadership during critical incidents.
• Own customer-facing communication during major outages, drafting transparent, empathetic public status page updates and post-mortem incident reports.
• Facilitate cross-functional root-cause analysis (RCA)meetings, ensuring action items are prioritized in engineering backlogs.
• Navigate and defuse friction while handling organizational politics between multiple teams in Engineering.

Required Skills and Experience

• Experience: 10+ years in Product Operations, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Technical Support Leadership, or Incident Management.
• Technical Literacy: Hands-on experience with synthetic monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Splunk, PagerDuty).
• Communication Mastery: Exceptional ability to tailor written and verbal messaging for vastly different audiences (from a panicked enterprise customer to a deeply technical developer, to an impatient CTO).
• Diplomacy & Grit: Proven track record of managing organizational politics, handling conflicting priorities, and maintaining a calm demeanor under intense pressure.
• Framework Knowledge: Strong understanding of ITIL frameworks, Agile methodologies, and modern CI/CD deployment pipelines.

Benefits & Perks

• Flexible/hybrid working arrangements.
• Health insurance.
• Novated Car Lease.
• Access to UST Perks (Reward Gateway), which offers discounts across major retailers.

Our commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Diversity and Inclusion are among the founding blocks of how UST as an organisation translates its values of Humility, Humanity, and Integrity into practice.

About UST

For more than 25 years, UST has worked side by side with the world's best companies to make a real impact through digital transformation. Together, with over 30,000 employees in 30+ countries, we build for boundless impact—touching billions of lives in the process.

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