Director, App Operations
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Are you tired of not being challenged, not having a voice, or having to work with outdated technologies? Do you want to be a direct contributor in a company that is an innovation leader and has the awards to prove it?DriveCentric is the premier customer relationship management (CRM) and AI marketing company that connects automotive dealerships to customers in innovative, award-winning ways.We're seeking an exceptional senior engineering leader to serve as Director of App Operations. This role requires extreme ownership, strategic thinking, the ability to drive operational excellence, and a customer-focused attitude. We win when our customers win. The ideal candidate is a seasoned full-stack software engineer who has been in the trenches of customer support, ready to lead while maintaining hands-on technical involvement and a sense of urgency in delivering immediate, tangible results for our customers.Responsibilities:

• Lead, develop, and manage team leads across our Application Support (Tier 2), Site Reliability, and Application Monitoring teams, owning the vision and driving relentless operational excellence as the 'Protector of Production'.
• Contribute to the excellence across the three teams that comprise the App Operations department:
• Application Support: Ensure rapid response to customer issues that have been escalated from the business while building self-service tools and identifying common failure patterns to streamline future resolutions.
• Site Reliability: Champion three core tenets—prevention through proactive monitoring and shift-left practices, detection via comprehensive alerting systems, and rapid resolution using well-tested playbooks and automation tools.
• Application Monitoring: Serve as the telemetry arm of our prevention-detection-resolution model, maintaining full-stack visibility through centralized logging, performance metrics, transaction tracing, and load analysis while delivering actionable alerts that drive rapid response.
• Lead by example in on-call participation, establishing sustainable rotation schedules across the App Operations teams while serving as the final escalation point for after-hours critical incidents.
• Perform as a technical contributor 20% of the time, with a 20% focus on personnel management, and 60% on maturing our application operations practice.
• Champion the evolution of application operations—people, process, and technology—enabling engineering teams to engage directly with customers for faster, higher-quality resolutions.
• Establish SLAs with stakeholders, internal and external, to ensure issues are addressed within acceptable thresholds.
• Establish the Application Support team (Tier 2) as the engineering arm of customer support, to embody the unique intersection of full-stack engineering capability and customer support excellence—using technical depth to solve complex problems while maintaining the urgency, communication skills, and customer empathy that define world-class support.
• Drive product expertise across the department, ensuring all team members develop a deep understanding of both user workflows and technical architecture to serve as Engineering's product knowledge center.
• Lead quarterly Objective and Key Results (OKR) planning and professional development initiatives for direct and indirect reports.
• Develop cross-training matrices and enforce documentation standards to guarantee at least two team members can perform each critical function, eliminating knowledge silos.
• Create automated resolution workflows, with comprehensive documentation, that reduce escalation volume and accelerate resolution time for complex issues.
• Analyze support patterns to identify common application and data issues, then lead the development of internal self-service tools for Customer Success Managers.
• Drive cross-functional alignment at the director level, ensuring App Operations initiatives integrate seamlessly with broader engineering, product, and business objectives.

Requirements:

• 8+ years of full-stack software engineering experience with at least 4 years in engineering leadership roles.
• A strong sense of ownership and pride in system stability and customer support as a competitive advantage.
• Deep expertise in production operations, incident management, and system reliability engineering.
• Customer service mindset with patience, empathy, and genuine concern while working through complex technical issues with high ownership to go above and beyond for customers.
• Willingness to remain hands-on technically while scaling leadership responsibilities.
• Experience working directly with customer escalations and translating customer needs into technical solutions.
• Previous technical support, help desk, or customer-facing role experience.
• Proven track record of managing distributed teams, including offshore resources.
• Experience with full-stack technologies (e.g., AWS, C# .NET, APIs, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Angular, TypeScript).
• Hands-on experience with logging, monitoring, and alerting technologies (e.g., Elastic APM, Kibana, Grafana).
• Demonstrated ability to balance technical leadership with people management and strategic planning.
• Strong understanding of the SDLC, DevOps practices, and modern monitoring/alerting systems.
• Experience implementing and tracking incident and customer support metrics, SLAs, and operational KPIs.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills to work effectively with Product, Engineering, customers; external and internal, and executive stakeholders.
• Proven ability to drive process improvements and organizational change.
• Experience with performance management, hiring, and developing engineering talent.

Pluses:

• Experience with the automotive industry or SaaS CRM platforms.
• Experience with event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka, etc.).
• Background in building and scaling engineering operations teams.
• Incident management platform experience (e.g., PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Grafana OnCall).
• ITIL or similar service management framework certification.
• Experience with chaos engineering or game day practices.
• Familiarity with SRE principles and practices.

Benefits:

• Competitive salary + bonus + annual merit increases
• Health, vision, and dental insurance (eligible on day 1)
• 401K with matching up to 4% (eligible after 90 days)
• 9 company holidays + 15 FTO days in first year
• Pluralsight subscription
• Professional growth opportunities

Equal Opportunity Statement:DriveCentric is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or other protected characteristics. All qualified applicants are encouraged to apply

Seniority level

• Seniority levelDirector

Employment type

• Employment typeFull-time

Job function

• Job functionManagement and Manufacturing
• IndustriesSoftware Development

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