IT Operations Lead

Job Description

Lead / Manager – IT Operations

WANO is building and scaling its B2B travel commerce platform, connecting OTAs, travel agents, suppliers, internal product teams, engineering teams, finance, and operations through a structured platform operating model.

The Operations Manager – Partner & Platform Operations Governance will be responsible for establishing and managing the operational governance layer for supplier and buyer onboarding, support SLAs, vendor performance reviews, ticket ownership, escalation management, incident communication, launch readiness, and SOP discipline.

This role is not a pure technical support role. It is a governance, operations, and service management role that ensures suppliers, buyers, vendors, and internal teams are aligned, tracked, supported, and managed through clear processes, measurable SLAs, and disciplined execution.

The role is critical to ensuring WANO can scale supplier and OTA onboarding without relying on manual follow-ups, informal communication, or individual dependency.

• Own the end-to-end operational governance process for onboarding new OTAs, buyers, suppliers, and partners.

• Define and maintain onboarding checklists from commercial agreement through to production go-live.

• Ensure all required onboarding inputs are completed, including contracts, SLAs, commercial terms, API readiness, support contacts, escalation paths, billing requirements, compliance requirements, and go-live approvals.

• Coordinate with Commercial, Product, Engineering, Finance, Legal, Support, and external partners to ensure onboarding readiness.

• Track onboarding progress, blockers, ageing items, owners, and target go-live dates.

• Ensure onboarding activities are properly documented, auditable, and repeatable.

• Create a structured onboarding governance cadence, including weekly status updates, blocker reviews, and readiness checkpoints.

• Assume full DevOps function and ensure the functions are well spread out amongst the team members

• Define support SLA structures for buyers, suppliers, vendors, and internal support teams.

• Establish clear severity levels, response times, resolution targets, escalation paths, and communication expectations.

• Work with internal stakeholders to define SLAs for incidents, onboarding requests, API support, ticket resolution, supplier issues, buyer issues, and production-impacting events.

• Ensure SLAs are realistic, measurable, and aligned with operational capacity.

• Monitor SLA performance and identify recurring breaches, bottlenecks, and ownership gaps.

• Produce SLA reporting for management review and continuous improvement.

• Recommend service improvement actions where SLA performance is below expectation.

• Build and maintain operational dashboards that provide visibility into onboarding, support performance, ticket ageing, SLA adherence, incident status, vendor performance, and launch readiness.

• Define the key metrics needed for daily, weekly, and monthly operational governance.

• Track metrics such as:

  • Open tickets by category

  • Ticket ageing

  • SLA breaches

  • Onboarding progress

  • Go-live readiness

  • Incident volume

  • Repeated issues

  • Vendor response times

  • Buyer/supplier issue trends

  • RCA closure status

• Provide leadership with clear operational visibility, including risks, blockers, trends, and required decisions.

• Use dashboard insights to drive process improvements and accountability.

• Establish a structured vendor and partner review process for suppliers, OTAs, technology vendors, and support partners.

• Conduct regular performance reviews based on SLA, ticket trends, incident history, responsiveness, operational quality, and unresolved issues.

• Maintain vendor performance records and action trackers.

• Ensure underperforming vendors or partners have documented corrective action plans.

• Coordinate follow-ups with internal and external stakeholders to ensure agreed actions are completed.

• Support commercial and leadership teams with operational evidence during vendor discussions or contract reviews.

• Ensure vendor performance is managed with data, not anecdotal feedback.

• Design clear escalation processes for buyer, supplier, vendor, and internal platform issues.

• Define escalation paths by severity, impact, ownership, and urgency.

• Ensure every issue has a clear owner, target resolution date, communication owner, and escalation route.

• Create escalation templates and communication standards for operational issues.

• Ensure escalations are tracked through the appropriate ticketing or workflow management tool.

• Reduce dependency on email and informal follow-ups by introducing structured tracking and accountability.

• Ensure unresolved or ageing issues are escalated in a timely and disciplined manner.

• Own the governance of operational tickets across supplier onboarding, buyer onboarding, API support, production issues, vendor queries, and internal platform support.

• Track ticket ageing, ownership, status, SLA adherence, and blocker reasons.

• Ensure tickets are categorised correctly and routed to the correct owner.

• Identify recurring issue patterns and work with Product, Engineering, Support, and vendors to address root causes.

• Establish regular ticket review cadences to prevent ageing, duplication, and unresolved ownership.

• Ensure every ticket has clear next steps, action owners, and expected resolution dates.

• Improve ticket discipline across teams by enforcing proper updates, closure notes, and RCA links where required.

• Act as the operational communication lead during incidents involving suppliers, buyers, vendors, APIs, platform availability, onboarding blockers, or production-impacting issues.

• Coordinate communication between Engineering, Product, Support, Commercial, external partners, and leadership.

• Ensure incident updates are factual, timely, structured, and business-impact focused.

• Define incident communication templates covering:

  • Impact

  • Current status

  • Affected parties

  • Action owner

  • Workaround

  • Next update time

  • Estimated recovery

  • Post-incident follow-up

• Ensure incidents are tracked through to closure, including RCA, preventive actions, and communication to relevant stakeholders.

• Maintain an incident log for trend analysis and governance reporting.

• Own operational readiness planning for new supplier onboarding, buyer onboarding, platform features, product launches, and production releases.

• Create and maintain launch readiness checklists covering:

  • Contract readiness

  • SLA confirmation

  • Support model

  • Escalation contacts

  • UAT completion

  • Training completion

  • SOP readiness

  • Monitoring readiness

  • Finance/billing readiness

  • Go-live approval

  • Hypercare plan

• Coordinate with Product, Engineering, QA, Finance, Operations, Commercial, and external partners to ensure all operational dependencies are addressed before go-live.

• Ensure launch risks, blockers, and open items are visible to leadership before approval.

• Manage post-go-live hypercare tracking and handover into BAU operations.

• Conduct post-launch reviews to capture lessons learned and improvement actions.

• Develop, maintain, and govern SOPs for onboarding, support, escalation, incident management, vendor reviews, SLA tracking, ticket management, and operational reporting.

• Ensure SOPs are practical, easy to follow, and kept up to date.

• Establish document ownership, review frequency, and approval process for operational procedures.

• Work with teams to ensure process adherence across internal and external stakeholders.

• Identify gaps where processes are unclear, duplicated, manual, or dependent on individuals.

• Drive continuous process improvement to reduce manual effort, improve visibility, and strengthen operational consistency.

• Ensure knowledge is centralised and accessible to reduce operational dependency on specific individuals.

• 7+ years of experience in operations management, programme management, vendor operations, service governance, partner operations, or related roles.

• Strong experience managing multi-stakeholder operational environments.

• Proven experience managing vendors, partners, BPOs, external service providers, or distributed operational teams.

• Strong understanding of SLA, KPI, quality, productivity, ageing, escalation, and performance governance.

• Experience coordinating incidents, escalations, RCA follow-ups, and stakeholder communication.

• Experience managing operational readiness for new launches, workflows, sites, vendors, or products.

• Strong experience creating dashboards, reports, trackers, SOPs, and operational governance routines.

• Ability to work with Product, Engineering, Commercial, Finance, Legal, Support, and external partners.

• Strong communication skills, with the ability to provide clear leadership updates and drive accountability across teams.

• Experience in travel, technology platforms, supplier onboarding, OTA operations, B2B platforms, or API-led environments is an advantage.

• Vendor governance and partner performance management.

• SLA and KPI dashboard management.

• Incident and escalation management.

• Operational readiness and launch governance.

• Business continuity planning.

• Process improvement and operational automation.

• Ticketing workflow management using tools such as Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk, or equivalent.

• Reporting and dashboard tools such as Power BI, Looker Studio, Google Dashboards, Excel, or equivalent.

• Familiarity with API-led platforms, supplier integrations, or B2B technology operations is an advantage.

This role is intended to bring operational discipline, governance, visibility, and accountability into WANO’s growing B2B platform operations.

The Operations Manager will not be expected to personally troubleshoot technical API issues at code or infrastructure level. However, the role must ensure that issues are correctly captured, assigned, escalated, communicated, tracked, and resolved through the right technical and business owners.

The ideal candidate will be someone who can create order from ambiguity, drive accountability across multiple teams, manage vendors and partners professionally, and build a scalable operating model that supports WANO’s growth.