Senior Operations Manager

Operations Manager\-AmericasSummary

Join Exponential Technology as the Americas Operations Manager — a senior contributing manager who owns Customer Support, DevOps, and QA across Americas time zones. You will partner with your APAC counterpart to deliver 24\-hour operational coverage for ETI’s enterprise client base of institutional investors. This is a management\-level technical leadership role: you will write code, build infrastructure, resolve production incidents, design processes, set operational strategy, and — as the firm scales — recruit and manage junior staff. You will automate aggressively using Agentic AI, ensuring that a small team operates with the output and precision of a much larger organization. As the Americas\-based manager, you will also serve as the primary operational point of contact for North American clients and coordinate directly with ETI leadership on operational priorities.

Day\-to\-Day Responsibilities

• Own uptime, latency performance, and incident response for ETI’s data warehouse and delivery platform during Americas operating hours.
• Triage and resolve customer support tickets with institutional\-grade speed and accuracy. Escalate only when necessary; close issues yourself whenever possible.
• Build, deploy, and maintain Kubernetes and Docker\-based microservices infrastructure across cloud providers (GCP, AWS, Azure) and on\-prem environments.
• Design, document, and enforce operational procedures and runbooks that scale with the business and adapt to new products and customer requirements.
• Set operational strategy and define SLAs, incident response protocols, and escalation paths across the global operations team.
• Conduct rigorous QA validation of all datasets before client delivery — maintain a zero\-tolerance policy for data quality defects.
• Monitor, diagnose, and troubleshoot automated workflow orchestration pipelines and data ingestion processes.
• Create and maintain monitoring dashboards (Grafana, Prometheus) with proactive alerting for system health, data pipeline status, and SLA compliance.
• Manage cloud cost tagging, reporting, and optimization across all provider accounts.
• Implement and enforce cybersecurity best practices across the application stack to support SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliance.
• Respond to client IT/Security questionnaires regarding cybersecurity procedures and data handling.
• Coordinate daily handoffs with the APAC Operations Manager to ensure seamless 24\-hour coverage with no dropped context.
• Serve as primary operational point of contact for North American enterprise clients, including direct communication during incidents and scheduled reviews.
• Onboard new datasets and ensure daily data updates are completed accurately and on schedule.
• Act as pre\-sales engineer for POCs and trial data deliveries in the Americas region.
• Report operational metrics, quality trends, and capacity needs to ETI leadership on a regular cadence.
• As the firm grows, recruit, onboard, and manage junior operations and support staff.

AI and Automation Responsibilities

• Design and deploy Agentic AI workflows to automate customer support triage, incident detection, and routine operational tasks.
• Leverage AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Windsurf, Cursor) to accelerate development of infrastructure scripts, monitoring tools, and automation pipelines.
• Build AI\-powered validation and QA frameworks that reduce manual testing and catch data quality issues before client delivery.
• Use LLM\-based tools for documentation generation, runbook creation, and knowledge base maintenance.
• Define the AI automation roadmap for the operations function — identify high\-toil processes and prioritize automation initiatives.
• Evaluate and adopt emerging AI/LLM tools to continuously improve operational efficiency and reduce toil.
• Implement AI\-driven monitoring and anomaly detection to identify issues before they impact clients.
• Train and mentor junior staff on effective use of AI tools in their daily workflows.

Requirements

• 7\+ years in a combined DevOps / operations / site reliability role, with at least 3 years in a technical management or team lead capacity.

* Strong software development skills in Python, Go, or C\+\+ — you write production code, not just scripts.

• Deep knowledge of Kubernetes and Docker in production environments (3\+ years).
• Hands\-on experience with cloud operations across at least two of: GCP, AWS, Azure.
• Proficiency with monitoring and observability tools: Grafana, Prometheus, and alerting frameworks.

* Strong database fundamentals — experience operating and querying relational databases, understanding of columnar data formats and high\-performance query engines.

• Solid networking knowledge: DNS, load balancing, reverse proxies (NGINX), VPNs, firewall rules, and cloud networking.

* Cybersecurity fluency — practical experience implementing security policies, managing access controls, and supporting compliance certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001\).

• Comfort working across both on\-prem Linux (Ubuntu) infrastructure and multi\-cloud environments.
• Proficiency with Agentic AI platforms and AI coding assistants — demonstrated ability to integrate AI tools into daily operational workflows.

* Significant financial services experience — direct exposure to market data, trading systems, institutional investors, or fintech platforms.

• Git\-based version control and CI/CD pipeline management.
• Demonstrated experience designing operational processes, defining SLAs, and managing incident response at an enterprise level.
• Track record of hiring, developing, and managing technical teams.

Cultural Fit — Who Thrives at ETI

* High Executive Functioning Skills — Ability to plan, prioritize, organize, and execute complex work independently. Self\-managing with strong working memory and task\-switching capability.

* Excellent Communicator — Clear, precise verbal and written communication. Able to articulate technical concepts to non\-technical stakeholders and vice versa. Responsive and proactive in updates.

* Team Player — Collaborative, ego\-free contributor who elevates others. Willing to pick up tasks outside your job description when the team needs it.

* Rapid Learner — Demonstrates a pattern of quickly acquiring new skills and domain knowledge. Picks up unfamiliar tools, languages, and frameworks in days, not months.

* Full Product Lifecycle Experience — Concrete experience across all aspects of product creation: ideation, design, development, testing, deployment, and iteration.

* Significant Financial Services Experience — Understanding of the domain’s unique requirements around data quality, latency, compliance, and security.

* Continuous Learner — Willingness and demonstrated habit of continuously learning new skills, tools, and methodologies.

* Critical Thinker — Questions assumptions, identifies root causes, and proposes well\-reasoned solutions rather than surface\-level fixes.

* Avid Reader — Reads continuously across technical documentation, industry publications, books, and research.

* Composure Under Pressure — Maintains a calm, professional temperament in high\-pressure situations. Handles production incidents, tight deadlines, and ambiguity without losing effectiveness.

Would Be Great If You Also Have Exposure To

• Apache Arrow and WebAssembly (WASM) for high\-performance data processing.
• C\+\+ development for performance\-critical systems.
• Experience building or managing data warehouses and analytics platforms at scale.
• Infrastructure\-as\-Code tools such as Terraform or Ansible.
• Stream processing and real\-time analytics architectures.
• Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and LLM deployment in production.
• Experience scaling a team from small (2\-5 people) to mid\-size (10\-20 people).
• Pre\-sales engineering or customer\-facing technical roles in B2B SaaS or data services.
• Budget management and vendor negotiation for cloud and infrastructure services.

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive base salary commensurate with experience.

* Stock option grant — participate in ETI’s growth as a pre\-Series A team member.

• Performance\-based cash bonuses.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k) retirement plan.
• Additional benefits as the company scales.

About Exponential Technology

At Exponential, we empower enterprises to innovate more rapidly by leveraging on\-prem and on\-cloud data technology in combination with tightly integrated analytics and LLM toolsets. By integrating data into a high\-performance and flexible data backplane, we help businesses of all sizes overcome data entropy and unlock their true analytical capacity as an organization. With over 25 years of experience in the institutional investment space, we leverage our knowledge to extract value from data with our State\-of\-the\-Art Technology and Analytics stack.

We are an AI\-native company. Every team member — from engineering to marketing to operations — uses Agentic AI and AI\-powered tools daily. If you are excited about working at the frontier of AI\-augmented productivity in financial data technology, we want to hear from you.

Exponential Technology Inc. \| Chicago, IL \| exponential\-tech.ai

Pay: $125,000\.00 \- $200,000\.00 per year

Benefits:

• 401(k)
• Dental insurance
• Health insurance
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Chicago, IL 60606