Operations Analytics Lead
DataStaff, Inc. is seeking an Operations Analytics Lead for a long-term contract opportunity with one of our direct clients in Albany, NY.
Job Description:
The Operations Analytics Lead will drive operational analytics, observability, systems administration coordination, and KPI/OKR governance across enterprise applications and technology services. You will use tools such as Splunk and Dynatrace to analyze operational metrics, improve visibility into application health and infrastructure performance, and support service reliability and business outcomes. This role partners with application, infrastructure, development, security, and business teams to identify issues, guide root-cause analysis, and transition repeatable metrics and reporting activities to Operations.
What you'll do
- Define and maintain metric definitions, targets, owners, data sources, collection schedules, and validation controls for KPIs and OKRs.
- Consolidate KPI/OKR data and communicate performance against objectives.
- Develop and optimize SPL searches, reports, alerts, dashboards, and scheduled reports using Splunk Enterprise.
- Analyze application, system, security, and integration logs, including HTTP status codes, errors, transaction failures, ingestion trends, and recurring patterns.
- Use analytical capabilities for application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, service-flow analysis, infrastructure visibility, anomaly detection, and alerting.
- Correlate performance indicators with logs and events to help isolate service degradation and accelerate root-cause analysis.
- Build operational scorecards and dashboards using tools such as Power BI, Splunk dashboards, and Excel.
- Track availability, latency, error rates, incident trends, SLA/SLO performance, capacity, workload, and automation outcomes.
- Coordinate and support administration of Linux/Unix and Windows environments, application servers, middleware, and integration platforms.
- Support service configuration, access and permissions, certificates, scheduled jobs, deployments, patching coordination, capacity monitoring, and environment health checks.
- Use Shell/Bash, Python, and, where appropriate, Java or API-based integrations to automate data collection, log processing, recurring reports, health checks, alert enrichment, and routine operational tasks.
- Partner with application and infrastructure teams to investigate incidents, correlate logs and metrics, identify root causes, document corrective actions, and track recurring issues through resolution.
- Support incident, problem, and change-management processes.
- Review monitoring coverage, alert thresholds, dashboards, and escalation paths.
- Reduce noisy or duplicate alerts, improve signal quality, and support service availability, resilience, and operational readiness.
- Manage milestones, dependencies, risks, action items, and reporting commitments.
- Work with business owners, engineering teams, application support, and leadership to establish accountability and communicate operational performance.
- Lead cross-functional tracking and coordination of production issues, application defects, incident investigations, and remediation activities across Development, QA, Infrastructure, and Operations.
- Monitor SLA commitments, identify recurring problems, track corrective and preventive actions, and provide clear status reporting to technical teams and leadership.
- Create runbooks, standard operating procedures, support matrices, metric inventories, escalation procedures, and training materials.
- Lead knowledge-transfer sessions and coordinate formal handover of KPI/OKR collection, dashboards, and recurring operational processes to the Operations team.
- Identify opportunities to improve observability, data quality, process consistency, automation, system reliability, and operational efficiency.
- Track continuous-improvement outcomes through measurable KPIs and OKRs.
- Deliver a governed KPI/OKR inventory with definitions, owners, targets, data sources, and reporting cadence.
- Deliver Splunk and/or Dynatrace dashboards, searches, alerts, and operational reports aligned to service needs.
- Provide log and performance analysis highlighting error patterns, service degradation, capacity concerns, and actionable remediation.
- Document operational health checks, support procedures, escalation paths, and incident/problem follow-up actions.
- Develop automation opportunities and scripts that reduce manual data collection and recurring reporting effort.
- Establish an issue and defect management framework with severity definitions, ownership and escalation paths, SLA tracking, aging reports, root-cause follow-up, and closure criteria.
- Complete an Operations transition package covering dashboards, metric collection, SOPs/runbooks, training, ownership, and handover sign-off.
What you'll bring
- 8+ years of related experience.
- Experience in IT operations, systems or application administration, operational analytics, technical project coordination, or a related enterprise technology role.
- Experience defining, collecting, validating, analyzing, and reporting KPIs, OKRs, SLAs, or SLOs.
- Hands-on experience with log analysis, monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis.
- Hands-on experience with Splunk Enterprise, SPL, dashboards, alerts, log ingestion, field extraction, and data normalization.
- Experience managing DevOps issue and defect lifecycles, including triage, prioritization, backlog and aging management, cross-team escalation, release coordination, and resolution reporting.
- Ability to create clear operational reports, dashboards, scorecards, and leadership updates.
- Strong knowledge of incident tracking, problem management, change coordination, documentation, and operational handover.
- Strong stakeholder management, communication, analytical thinking, prioritization, and continuous-improvement skills.
Nice to have
- Experience with performance tool monitoring, distributed tracing, infrastructure monitoring, service flow, and anomaly detection.
- Familiarity with observability and monitoring platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, AppDynamics, Elastic/ELK, or OpenTelemetry.
- Experience administering or supporting Linux/Unix and Windows systems, application servers, middleware, and enterprise integrations.
- Knowledge of JBoss, MuleSoft, REST APIs, JSON, SFTP, and Twilio or similar communications/integration services.
- Scripting or automation experience with Shell/Bash, Python, PowerShell, Java, or REST APIs.
- Familiarity with IT service management and workflow tools such as ServiceNow and Jira, and analytics tools such as Power BI and Excel.
- Understanding of networking and application fundamentals, including DNS, TLS/certificates, HTTP/HTTPS, ports, authentication, access control, and service dependencies.
- Experience preparing runbooks, operational readiness checklists, support models, knowledge-transfer materials, and service transition plans.
DataStaff offers W-2 employment opportunities with a competitive benefits package. Many of our positions include medical, dental, and vision insurance, as well as paid vacation, sick leave, and holidays. Recognizing that many of our assignments are long-term, DataStaff also offers a 401(k) retirement savings plan, with employees becoming eligible after six months of employment.