Role Overview

Leads a team responsible for the 24x7 operational support, monitoring, stability, and continuous improvement of mission-critical banking applications serving Commercial and Institutional clients. Accountable for ensuring high availability, resilience, service reliability, and operational excellence across production environments while minimizing customer impact and business disruption.

Provides leadership and oversight for production monitoring, incident response, problem management, root cause analysis, service restoration, risk mitigation, and support processes. Collaborates with application development, infrastructure, security, vendors, and business stakeholders to maintain stable and secure banking services that meet established service level objectives and regulatory requirements.

The application supports critical payment, cash management, file transmission, and client-facing business services where system outages or processing failures may have significant customer and business impact.

Key Accountabilities

Production Operations & Service Stability

• Leads a high-performing Application Support team responsible for 24x7 production monitoring, operational support, and service restoration activities.
• Ensures the stability, availability, performance, scalability, resiliency, and recoverability of critical banking applications and supporting platforms.
• Establishes and manages operational support processes, production readiness standards, monitoring strategies, and service-level commitments.
• Oversees daily production operations, scheduled processing activities, batch executions, file transmissions, and critical business processing windows.
• Continuously evaluates application health, operational risks, support metrics, and service trends to drive proactive improvements.

Incident Management & Service Restoration

• Leads Major Incident, Critical Incident, and Severity-1 event management activities.
• Coordinates rapid response and recovery efforts involving support teams, infrastructure teams, vendors, and business stakeholders.
• Acts as an escalation point for complex production issues and customer-impacting events.
• Ensures timely communication, stakeholder updates, executive reporting, and customer impact assessments during incidents.
• Drives post-incident reviews, root cause analysis (RCA), corrective actions, and preventative measures to reduce recurring incidents.

Level 2 Application Support

• Provides leadership and oversight for Level 2 application investigation, troubleshooting, and issue resolution.
• Guides teams in diagnosing application defects, integration failures, performance degradation, infrastructure-related issues, and operational incidents.
• Partners with Development and Engineering teams for Level 3 escalation and long-term remediation.
• Ensures support teams maintain strong application knowledge and operational expertise across business processes, data flows, interfaces, and technologies.

Problem Management & Continuous Improvement

• Leads problem management processes to identify recurring issues, operational risks, and systemic weaknesses.
• Drives permanent fixes, automation opportunities, knowledge management, and operational efficiencies.
• Implements monitoring enhancements, alert optimization, self-healing capabilities, and support process improvements.
• Uses operational metrics and incident trends to improve service reliability and customer experience.

Change, Release & Production Readiness

• Governs production change implementation activities and ensures operational readiness before deployment.
• Reviews change requests, release plans, rollback strategies, and support requirements.
• Ensures all releases meet production support, resiliency, security, and business continuity standards.
• Participates in go-live activities and provides leadership during high-risk production implementations.

Vendor & Stakeholder Management

• Builds strong partnerships with business stakeholders, technology teams, infrastructure teams, security teams, and external vendors.
• Manages vendor relationships related to operational support, service management, escalations, compliance, and support agreements.
• Ensures vendors meet contractual obligations, response targets, and operational performance expectations.
• Provides operational reporting and service reviews to senior leadership and stakeholders.

Risk, Compliance & Resiliency

• Ensures adherence to operational risk controls, security policies, audit requirements, regulatory obligations, and technology standards.
• Leads Disaster Recovery testing, Business Continuity planning, operational resiliency exercises, and production recovery validation.
• Identifies and mitigates operational risks before they impact business operations or customers.

People Leadership

• Builds, develops, and leads a highly skilled Application Support organization.
• Establishes clear accountability for service quality, incident response, operational excellence, and customer focus.
• Coaches employees, builds technical capabilities, supports career development, and recognizes strong performance.
• Creates a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, collaboration, and operational discipline.
• Fosters a culture aligned to BMO purpose, values, diversity, inclusion, and customer-centricity.

Enterprise Leadership

• Serves as a subject matter expert on production operations, incident management, operational resilience, and application support practices.
• Provides strategic guidance on support models, operational risk management, support transformation, and automation initiatives.
• Applies expertise to resolve highly complex, ambiguous, and business-critical operational challenges.
• Broader accountabilities may be assigned as required.

Risk Management

Take measured risks while protecting the Bank by applying the Risk Management Framework in the execution of responsibilities, making risk-informed decisions that align with business objectives, regulatory requirements, customer commitments, and operational resilience expectations.

Qualifications

Advanced Level Proficiency

• Production Support & Application Operations
• Incident Management & Major Incident Leadership
• Problem Management & Root Cause Analysis
• Service Availability & Reliability Engineering
• Application Monitoring & Alert Management
• IT Service Management (ITSM)
• Change & Release Management
• Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity
• Operational Risk Management
• Service Level Management
• Vendor Management
• Stakeholder Management
• Cloud Platforms & Infrastructure Operations
• DevOps & Production Operations
• Data Analysis & Operational Reporting
• Continuous Improvement & Process Optimization
• Leadership & Team Development
• Verbal and Written Communication Skills
• Analytical & Problem-Solving Skills
• Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Decision Making Under Pressure
• Managing Ambiguity & Complex Operational Events

Intermediate Level Proficiency

• Cybersecurity & Information Security Controls
• Application Architecture & System Design
• API & Integration Technologies
• Automation & Scripting
• ITIL Processes & Service Management Frameworks
• Learning Agility
• Creative Thinking
• Change Leadership

Experience

• Typically 7+ years of technology experience with significant experience in Production Support, Application Operations, Incident Management, or Service Reliability roles.
• 3+ years of leadership experience managing application support or production operations teams.
• Experience supporting business-critical applications in Banking, Payments, Financial Services, or other highly regulated industries.
• Experience managing major incidents, service restorations, escalations, disaster recovery testing, and production risk management.
• Post-secondary degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Seasoned technology professional with strong application support, operational leadership, and service management expertise.
• Must have experience in:

Production Support & Incident Management

P1/P2 incident handling

RCA and problem management

SLA and operational risk management

Application Architecture & Integration

APIs, microservices, batch processing

Middleware and upstream/downstream dependencies

Cloud & DevOps

AWS fundamentals

CI/CD pipelines

OpenShift/Kubernetes concepts

Monitoring & Observability

Dynatrace, CloudWatch, Splunk

Alerting, logging, performance monitoring

Database & Troubleshooting

SQL and data analysis

End-to-end issue investigation

Payments & File Transfer Technologies

SFTP, AS2, FTPS, Connect:Direct

PGP encryption and payment processing flow