Intelligent Ops and Observability Engineer

The Engineer, Intelligent Operations and Observability plays a critical role within the McCormick Technology Operations Center by helping maintain a clear, real-time view of the operational health of the company’s technology environment.  This role is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operational state across infrastructure, platforms, and critical services, ensuring that incidents are prioritized appropriately, service providers are responding with speed and quality, and restoration activities are coordinated to minimize business impact.

This role also serves as a technical expert for the company’s operational tool suite, including application performance monitoring, infrastructure and systems monitoring, event aggregation, alerting, dashboards, reporting, and related observability capabilities.  The engineer will implement, administer, optimize, and continuously improve these capabilities to strengthen operational awareness, improve signal quality, and support more proactive service management.

Finally, this role is an important stakeholder in the evolution of incident response practices.  While not the owner of incident management policy, the role helps shape standards and procedures by bringing operational insight, identifying gaps, recommending improvements, and reinforcing adherence across service providers and internal teams.

Description

% of Time Spent

1. Operational Oversight and Service Restoration
   The Engineer, Intelligent Operations and Observability provides active operational leadership within the McCormick Technology Operations Center during incidents, service degradations, and other events affecting the company’s technology environment. This role maintains real time awareness of the operational state across infrastructure, cloud platforms, applications, networks, and end user services, and leads coordinated response efforts to ensure the appropriate teams and service providers are engaged quickly and working with urgency toward restoration. The role drives incident response by reinforcing priorities, tracking progress, challenging assumptions, escalating when needed, and helping ensure the right level of visibility, accountability, and stakeholder attention is maintained through recovery and stabilization.

35%

2. Observability and Operational Tooling
   Implements, administers, and continuously improves the operational tooling environment that supports enterprise monitoring, event management, and service visibility. Serves as a technical expert across application performance monitoring, infrastructure and systems monitoring, event aggregation, alerting, dashboards, and reporting, ensuring the tool suite delivers meaningful and actionable insight. Partners across infrastructure, cloud, application, and service teams to expand monitoring coverage, improve signal quality, reduce alert noise, and strengthen overall observability and operational decision making.

35%

3. Continuous Improvement and Operational Maturity
   Contributes to the ongoing maturity of the Technology Operations Center by identifying and implementing improvements in operational processes, tooling, visibility, and service assurance practices. Supports the development of runbooks, standards, and response procedures, and uses operational data and trends to recommend opportunities for automation, standardization, and stronger preventive controls. Works within established service management and SIAM aligned practices to improve coordination across internal teams and service providers, while helping advance a more proactive, insight driven, and resilient operations model.

15%

4. Incident Response Process Contribution
   Serves as a key stakeholder in the ongoing development and improvement of incident response practices, standards, and supporting procedures by providing operational insight and practical recommendations based on real world experience. Helps shape how incident prioritization, escalation, communications, and restoration processes are refined over time, while reinforcing adherence to established practices across service providers and internal teams. Supports governance and operational reviews by identifying execution gaps, highlighting response trends, and recommending improvements that strengthen consistency, discipline, and overall response effectiveness.

15%

Qualifications

Description

Level of Education and Discipline

• Bachelor’s degree required in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline.
• Advanced degree in a related field preferred.

Certification and/or Licenses

• Relevant certifications in IT service management, cloud, reliability engineering, or operational disciplines are preferred, such as ITIL, SRE, or major platform certifications.

Experience - functional/industry/commercial knowledge, business acumen

• 10+ yrs Experience in technology operations, production support, service availability, observability, monitoring, or service management roles in a complex, global enterprise environment.
• Experience supporting incident response, major incident coordination, service restoration, or operational command center activities.
• Experience implementing, administering, or supporting tools related to APM, infrastructure monitoring, event management, observability, or operational reporting.
• Experience working in environments with managed service providers or third-party support partners.
• Experience working within ITIL, service management, or SIAM aligned operating models is preferred.

Interpersonal Skills - leadership, interactions, communication, influence

• Strong understanding of incident management, event management, service monitoring, escalation practices, and operational governance.
• Strong technical knowledge of operational tooling, including monitoring, event correlation, dashboarding, alerting, and reporting.
• Ability to interpret operational signals, distinguish meaningful issues from noise, and improve monitoring effectiveness.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to identify trends, risks, and practical improvements.
• Strong communication skills, especially during incidents or time sensitive operational situations.
• Ability to work across organizational boundaries and influence adherence without direct ownership authority.
• Strong organizational skills, attention to detail, and follow-through in a fast-moving operational environment.

Other Skills and HPO Competencies

• Brings strong operational judgment and remains calm under pressure.
• Combines technical depth in operational tooling with practical understanding of incident response execution.
• Drives accountability and follow-through across teams and providers.
• Uses data and operational insight to improve resilience and service quality over time.
• Acts as a credible partner in shaping better operational practices while reinforcing consistent execution.