Operational Test Director Jobs in O Fallon, IL (NOW HIRING)

At Zelis, we Get Stuff Done. So, let's get to it!

A Little About Us

Zelis is modernizing the healthcare financial experience across payers, providers, and healthcare consumers. We serve more than 750 payers, including the top five national health plans, regional health plans, TPAs and millions of healthcare providers and consumers across our platform of solutions. Zelis sees across the system to identify, optimize, and solve problems holistically with technology built by healthcare experts - driving real, measurable results for clients.

At Zelis, AI is woven into the fabric of how we work. Every associate is expected - and empowered - to partner with AI to challenge the status quo, accelerate innovation, and amplify their impact. This is a place for builders with a growth mindset who act with agility, embrace change, and use modern technology to shape smarter solutions, exceptional experiences, and the future of our industry for our clients, customers, and our culture.

A Little About You

You bring a unique blend of personality and professional expertise to your work, inspiring others with your passion and dedication. Your career is a testament to your diverse experiences, community involvement, and the valuable lessons you've learned along the way. You are more than just your resume; you are a reflection of your achievements, the knowledge you've gained, and the personal interests that shape who you are.

Position Overview

The Senior Manager, Site Reliability & Operational Resilience will lead and mature the enterprise capabilities that enable Zelis to detect, respond to, recover from, and continuously learn from technology disruptions. Reporting to the Director, Global Operations, this leader will set the strategy and operating model for Enterprise Observability, Major Incident Command, Disaster Recovery Orchestration, and reliability engineering, while partnering with the IT Service Management Process team to strengthen problem management and drive disciplined execution of major-incident corrective actions.
This leader will lead a globally distributed function in close partnership with an India-based leader. Together, they will align priorities, standards, coverage, handoffs, performance measures, and talent development as one global organization.
This is a build-and-transform opportunity for a technically credible, pragmatic leader who enjoys fixing what is not working, creating durable operating mechanisms, and scaling strong practices across a complex enterprise. The successful candidate will combine calm leadership under pressure with the engineering depth, influence, and persistence required to turn reliability and resilience into measurable business outcomes.

What You'll Do

Build and scale the practice. Define and execute a multi-year Site Reliability & Operational Resilience roadmap, including the target operating model, service offerings, governance, standards, talent plan, maturity measures, and adoption strategy required to operate at enterprise scale.

Lead a global team of senior engineers. Coach, organize, and develop a team composed primarily of senior engineers and technical leads. Partner with the India-based leader to create clear ownership, effective follow-the-sun handoffs, sustainable coverage, strong technical decision-making, career growth, and a culture of high autonomy with clear accountability.

Own the enterprise observability strategy. Establish the target-state architecture and operating model across LogicMonitor, New Relic, Splunk, and Datadog. Standardize telemetry across metrics, logs, traces, events, synthetic monitoring, and service health; improve onboarding, dashboards, integration, signal quality, alert precision, platform economics, and adoption across critical services.

Mature the Major Incident Command capability. Lead, coach, and scale the Incident Commander function. Establish a consistent command model, severity standards, decision rights, playbooks, technical and business coordination, global handoffs, executive communications, and learning mechanisms that accelerate service restoration and increase confidence during high-impact events.

Build Disaster Recovery Orchestration. Create the process, governance, annual testing strategy, roles, communications, and cross-functional coordination needed to execute reliable disaster recovery exercises. Establish and govern a single source of truth for recovery plans, runbooks, dependencies, ownership, test evidence, lessons learned, and remediation status.

Make recovery readiness visible and measurable. Define recovery-readiness measures and dashboards that monitor plan currency, test coverage, critical dependencies, RTO/RPO attainment, recovery gaps, and remediation aging. Help advance the organization from periodic disaster recovery testing toward continuous operational resilience through scenario exercises, game days, failover validation, and ongoing learning.

Close the loop after incidents. Partner with the IT Service Management Process team to improve post-incident reviews, root-cause quality, known-error practices, and execution of problem-management and major-incident action items. Create transparent mechanisms for ownership, due dates, dependencies, aging, risk acceptance, escalation, and verification of effectiveness while keeping delivery accountability with the assigned action owners.

Establish reliability and resilience standards. Define practical standards for service tiering, SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, production readiness, capacity, dependency management, recovery objectives, resilience testing, operational health, and reliability reviews. Embed these practices into the lifecycle of critical services.

Engineer out toil and recurring failure. Turn operational pain points into an engineering backlog and drive automation, runbook automation, self-service, event correlation, self-healing, and prioritized technical-debt remediation that reduce manual work and prevent repeat incidents.

Influence across the enterprise. Partner with Application Engineering, Infrastructure, Cloud and Platform Engineering, Cybersecurity, Enterprise Architecture, Business Continuity, Risk and Compliance, Product, business operations, and third-party providers to embed reliability, recoverability, and resilience into technology decisions and service ownership.

Measure and communicate what matters. Create decision-quality metrics and executive reporting that connect customer impact, service availability, detection and restoration speed, recurring incidents, alert quality, action-item aging, recovery readiness, resilience risk, automation, and team health to business outcomes.

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years of progressive experience in Site Reliability Engineering, production engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, cloud operations, infrastructure engineering, or a closely related discipline.
• 3+ years of people leadership experience, including direct leadership of senior engineers, technical leads, managers, or globally distributed teams.
• Demonstrated success building or materially maturing at least two of the following enterprise capabilities: observability, Site Reliability Engineering, major incident command, problem-management execution, disaster recovery, or operational resilience.
• Proven experience leading high-severity production incidents, including command and control, executive communications, cross-functional coordination, risk-based decision-making, and post-incident learning.
• Experience orchestrating disaster recovery tests or resilience exercises, including recovery-plan governance, cross-functional coordination, documentation management, RTO/RPO validation, evidence capture, and remediation tracking.
• Strong understanding of distributed-system and hybrid-enterprise failure modes across cloud platforms, networks, containers, operating systems, databases, messaging, APIs, third-party services, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience with enterprise observability practices across metrics, logs, traces, events, alerting, dashboards, synthetic monitoring, and service-level objectives.
• Strong engineering and automation orientation, with working knowledge of scripting, APIs, infrastructure as code, runbook automation, or event-driven remediation using technologies such as Python, PowerShell, Go, Terraform, or equivalent tools.
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior technical and business stakeholders, establish accountability without relying solely on direct authority, and translate operational risk into clear business decisions.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Ability to support critical incidents and planned recovery exercises outside normal business hours when required.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in healthcare technology, healthcare payments, financial services, insurance, or another highly regulated and business-critical environment.
• Experience operating Azure and/or AWS at enterprise scale, including Kubernetes-based, hybrid, or multi-cloud environments.
• Direct experience with one or more of the current observability platforms-LogicMonitor, New Relic, Splunk, and Datadog-and with telemetry standards such as OpenTelemetry.
• Working knowledge of ITIL problem management, major incident management, change enablement, and an enterprise ITSM platform such as Jira Service Management combined with a strong engineering mindset.
• Experience with global or follow-the-sun operating models, third-party service providers, and vendor incident escalation and corrective-action management.
• Relevant certifications in cloud platforms, Site Reliability Engineering, IT service management, business continuity, disaster recovery, or incident command.

Why This Role

This role offers the opportunity to build a cohesive enterprise capability rather than simply operate existing processes. You will shape the team, tooling strategy, standards, metrics, and operating mechanisms that determine how Zelis sees risk, responds under pressure, recovers critical services, prevents recurrence, and becomes more resilient over time.

Please note at this time we are unable to proceed with candidates who require visa sponsorship now or in the future.

Location and Workplace Flexibility

Zelis is headquartered in the U.S., with multiple locations across the country and in Hyderabad, India. Check out our locations to learn more about our offices. All employee work locations are based on the needs of the position and are determined by the Leadership team. In-office work and activities vary based on work and team objectives in accordance with Company policies.

While location expectations vary by role, candidates within approximately 50 miles of a U.S. office are generally preferred to support collaboration when needed. Our hybrid approach is flexible, and in-office presence is guided by team and business needs rather than a fixed weekly schedule.

Base Salary Range

$139,000.00 - $176,700.00

At Zelis we are committed to providing fair and equitable compensation packages. The base salary range allows us to make an offer that considers multiple individualized factors, including experience, education, qualifications, as well as job-related and industry-related knowledge and skills, etc. Base pay is just one part of our Total Rewards package, which may also include discretionary bonus plans, commissions, or other incentives depending on the role.

Zelis' full-time associates are eligible for a highly competitive benefits package as well, which demonstrates our commitment to our employees' health, well-being, and financial protection. The US-based benefits include a 401k plan with employer match, flexible paid time off, holidays, parental leaves, life and disability insurance, and health benefits including medical, dental, vision, and prescription drug coverage.

Equal Employment Opportunity
Zelis is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
We welcome applicants from all backgrounds and encourage you to apply even if you don't meet 100% of the qualifications for the role. We believe in the value of diverse perspectives and experiences and are committed to building an inclusive workplace for all.

Accessibility Support
We are dedicated to ensuring our application process is accessible to all candidates. If you are a qualified individual with a disability or a disabled veteran and require a reasonable accommodation with any part of the application and/or interview process, please email TalentAcquisition@zelis.com.

Disclaimer

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by people assigned to this classification. They are not to be construed as an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties, and skills required of personnel so classified. All personnel may be required to perform duties outside of their normal responsibilities, duties, and skills from time to time.