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Operational Readiness Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Executive Protection Specialist The Simon Agency Operational Readiness Network (ORN) Location: Los Angeles, CA Work Arrangement: Independent Contractor (1099) or W2 Employee | Assignment-Based ...

Staff Operations Engineer

San Diego, CA ยท On-site

$73K - $99K/yr

Proven ability to operate with high personal ownership over physical assets and their operational readiness, including vendor coordination and technical decision-making. Preferred Qualifications

Participate in operational readiness activities for new deployments, expansions, and infrastructure upgrades. * Escalate operational risks that may impact availability, safety, or project schedules.

Own operational readiness activities supporting new campus deployments and infrastructure expansion. * Partner with commissioning teams to transition facilities from construction and startup into ...

Lab Operations Engineer

Santa Clara, CA ยท On-site

$70 - $75/hr

Support operational readiness efforts for emerging hardware technologies. Skills Linux, Hardware Validation, System Validation, BIOS, Python, Bash, Automation Top Skills Details Linux,Hardware ...

Support operational readiness efforts for emerging hardware technologies. Skills Linux, Hardware Validation, System Validation, BIOS, Python, Bash, Automation Top Skills Details Linux,Hardware ...

Showing results 21-40

Operational Readiness information

What is operational readiness?

Operational readiness refers to the process of ensuring that an organization, system, or project is fully prepared to operate effectively and efficiently when it goes live or enters into service. This involves verifying that all people, processes, equipment, and support systems are in place and functioning as intended. The goal is to minimize risks, prevent disruptions, and achieve a smooth transition from the planning or development phase to regular operations. Operational readiness is critical in industries like construction, manufacturing, IT, and healthcare, where successful project launches and ongoing performance are essential.

How does an operational readiness role typically collaborate with project teams to ensure smooth transitions to live operations?

In an Operational Readiness role, professionals work closely with project managers, engineers, and support staff from the early stages of a project to understand operational requirements. They facilitate knowledge transfer, identify potential risks, and help design processes and training to prepare teams for go-live. This collaboration ensures that all stakeholders are aligned, that systems and processes are thoroughly tested, and that teams are equipped to handle incidents or changes effectively. Regular meetings and readiness reviews are common practices to track progress and address challenges before launch.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive in operational readiness, and why are they important?

To thrive in Operational Readiness, you need strong project management abilities, process optimization knowledge, and a background in operations or engineering, often supported by relevant degrees or certifications. Familiarity with tools such as Lean Six Sigma, risk management software, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is typically required. Excellent communication, adaptability, and problem-solving skills help professionals coordinate cross-functional teams and respond to evolving challenges. These skills ensure smooth transitions to new processes or systems, minimizing disruptions and maximizing organizational efficiency.

What is the difference between Operational Readiness vs Maintenance Technician?

AspectOperational ReadinessMaintenance Technician
CredentialsCertifications in safety, quality, and operational proceduresTechnical certifications in equipment repair and maintenance
Work EnvironmentPre-commissioning, startup, and process optimization phasesRoutine equipment repair and preventive maintenance
Employer & Industry UsageManufacturing, energy, oil & gas industries during project startupManufacturing, facilities, and industrial plants for ongoing maintenance

Operational Readiness focuses on preparing systems for production, ensuring safety, and optimizing startup processes. Maintenance Technicians handle ongoing equipment repairs and preventive maintenance. While both roles require technical skills, Operational Readiness is more project-focused, whereas Maintenance Technicians support daily operational upkeep.

What are the most commonly searched types of Operational Readiness jobs in California?

The most popular types of Operational Readiness jobs in California are:

What are popular job titles related to Operational Readiness jobs in California?

For Operational Readiness jobs in California, the most frequently searched job titles are:

What job categories do people searching Operational Readiness jobs in California look for?

The top searched job categories for Operational Readiness jobs in California are:

Infographic showing various Operational Readiness job openings in California as of August 2026, with employment types broken down into 91% Full Time, 8% Part Time, and 1% Contract. Highlights an 93% Physical, 3% Hybrid, and 4% Remote job distribution.

Senior Staff Service Reliability and Operational Intelligence Engineer

IonQ

Santa Clara, CA โ€ข On-site

Full-time

Posted 21 days ago


Job description

Location: Santa Clara, CA
Travel: Up to 25%
Job ID:
ย  1795

The Role:ย 

The Platform Engineering team builds, secures, and operates scalable infrastructure for cloud-managed SaaS products with on-premises components deployed at customer sites.
The Service Reliability and Operational Intelligence discipline ensures the platform remains stable and resilient, with focus on service continuity and seamless customer experience. It owns production reliability and resilience, observability architecture, service-level objectives, incident response, and implementation of AIOps workflows for triage, remediation, and self-healing.ย 

As a Senior Staff Service Reliability and Operational Intelligence Engineer, you define the technical direction for reliability across regions and services. You own the reliability strategy, establish the standards and mechanisms that guide production operations, and elevate excellence through design leadership, operational discipline, and mentorship. You stay deeply hands-on by designing and operating observability platforms, defining and governing SLO programs, leading high-severity incident response, and building resilience and disaster-recovery automation.ย 

The work is driven by observability and automation, with a focus on detecting and fixing issues before customers are affected and using every incident to improve the system.

Responsibilities:

  • Own the technical strategy and multi-year roadmap for operational excellence and production readiness across development, pre-production, and production environments.ย 
  • Define and govern the New Service Introduction framework, including mandatory architecture, security, resilience, capacity, observability, supportability, and release-readiness reviews before services enter production.ย 
  • Establish organization-wide service ownership standards covering service catalog records, accountable owners, dependency maps, runbooks, support models, escalation paths, recovery objectives, and on-call readiness.ย 
  • Lead the architecture and evolution of the shared observability platform, establishing consistent standards for logs, metrics, distributed traces, and profiles across production systems.ย 
  • Define standards for dashboards, alert policies, synthetic monitoring, telemetry quality, retention, sampling, cardinality, and cost controls.ย 
  • Own the reliability governance model for production services, including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and escalation mechanisms.ย 
  • Connect service-health signals to customer and business impact, enabling early anomaly detection, service-degradation prevention, and rapid isolation of end-user-impacting events.ย 
  • Advance incident-management maturity through consistent severity classification, incident command, stakeholder and executive communications, automated evidence collection, and coordinated response to high-severity incidents.ย 
  • Establish blameless post-incident review practices, ensure remediation actions are tracked to completion, and drive systemic fixes for recurring failure modes.ย 
  • Lead operational capacity and efficiency management, including demand forecasting, cloud and Kubernetes capacity, performance testing, scaling thresholds, headroom policies, resource rightsizing, and capacity-risk reviews.ย 
  • Design and govern AI Ops capabilities for event correlation, alert-noise reduction, predictive detection, probable root-cause analysis, autonomous triage, assisted remediation, and controlled self-healing.ย 
  • Deliver secure AI-agent workflows across observability platforms, service catalog, Jira, Confluence, source control, and CI/CD.ย 
  • Improve on-call effectiveness through sustainable rotation design, operational-readiness standards, escalation policies, diagnostic automation, alert-quality management, and reliable follow-the-sun handoffs.ย 
  • Provide hands-on technical leadership during major incidents, complex reliability investigations, architectural reviews, resilience exercises, and critical service launches.ย 
  • Use operational data, incident trends, service-level performance, capacity signals, change outcomes, and automation effectiveness to prioritize continuous improvement.

Requirements:

  • 12+ years of production engineering, site reliability engineering, platform engineering, or cloud operations experience, including recent hands-on reliability work.ย 
  • Recent experience designing and operating large-scale, fault-tolerant production systems on AWS or GCP.ย 
  • Deep understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, networking, CI/CD, and production failure modes.ย 
  • Demonstrated ownership of observability architecture, including instrumentation of production systems and governance of metrics, logs, traces, SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets.ย 
  • Proven experience establishing reliability and operational-readiness standards for business-critical services.ย 
  • Hands-on experience designing and executing failure experiments, disaster-recovery exercises, and validated service failovers.ย 
  • Experience personally commanding SEV1 or SEV2 incidents, coordinating technical and executive communications, and driving root causes through to systemic remediation.
  • Demonstrated ownership of measurable reliability outcomes such as availability, latency, MTTR, change-failure rate, alert quality, and error-budget adherence.ย 
  • Experience with capacity forecasting, performance testing, scaling strategies, and cloud and Kubernetes resource management.ย 
  • Strong software engineering and automation skills using languages such as Python or Go, infrastructure as code, and modern delivery toolchains.ย 
  • Evidence of multi-team technical leadership through architecture reviews, standards, coaching, and mechanisms adopted beyond a single service or team.ย 
  • Ability to influence cross-functional stakeholders and deliver complex initiatives without relying on direct management authority.

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Experience prioritizing operational risk using identity, workload, dependency, and exposure-path context to focus remediation on issues with material customer or business impact.ย 
  • Experience designing AI Ops capabilities for anomaly detection, event correlation, predictive alerting, root-cause analysis, and operational noise reduction.ย 
  • Hands-on experience with autonomous remediation and self-healing workflows using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore or comparable agentic automation frameworks.ย 
  • Experience integrating governed AI agents with operational platforms such as Jira, Confluence, source control, CI/CD, service catalogs, and observability systems.ย 
  • Practical experience with capacity optimization, resource rightsizing, efficiency engineering, telemetry cost management, and FinOps principles.ย 
  • Experience designing and operating load-balancing solutions, health-based failover, global traffic management, and performance optimization for highly available services.ย 
  • Ability to integrate networking, security, resilience, performance, and operability requirements into cohesive platform architecture decisions.ย 
  • Experience with progressive-delivery techniques such as canary deployments, blue-green deployments, automated rollback, and feature-flag governance.ย 
  • Experience establishing sustainable global on-call models and follow-the-sun operational practices.ย 


The total compensation package includes base, bonus, equity, and a range of benefit options found on our career site.