Technical Service Operations Lead (TSO Lead), Baku

We are looking for a Technical Service Operations Lead (TSO Lead) who is operationally driven, collaborative, analytical, and a strong communicator to join our Global Technical Operations (GTO) team. The best candidate will be someone who thrives in a fast-paced, highly collaborative, and exceptionally dynamic setting and is excited to help coordinate incident response alongside cross-functional teams, identify trends and patterns in production issues, improve how we communicate with partners during incidents, and drive continuous improvement through post-incident reviews.

Strong incident management experience, ITIL knowledge, and observability/monitoring expertise are essential, along with experience in technical operations, SRE, or NOC environments supporting high-availability platforms (payments, e-commerce, SaaS, or gaming). The ability to communicate clearly and effectively in English — both written and verbal — across technical and executive audiences will be key to your success in this role.

If you're passionate about driving operational excellence and platform reliability at scale and love ensuring the reliability and uptime of commerce and payment solutions that game developers and players depend on, we would love to hear from you!

Xsolla is a global commerce company with robust tools and services to help developers solve the inherent challenges of the video game industry. From indie to AAA, companies partner with Xsolla to help them fund, distribute, market, and monetize their games. Grounded in the belief in the future of video games, Xsolla is resolute in the mission to bring opportunities together, and continually make new resources available to creators.

Headquartered and incorporated in Los Angeles, California, Xsolla operates as the merchant of record and has helped over 1,500+ game developers to reach more players and grow their businesses around the world. With more paths to profits and ways to win, developers have all the things needed to enjoy the game.

Responsibilities

• Serve as Incident Commander for major incidents — coordinating cross-functional response teams, driving investigation, making escalation decisions, and ensuring incidents are resolved within SLA targets.
• Own all incident communications: draft and send clear, timely updates to senior leadership, Customer Success, and partner/customer contacts throughout the incident lifecycle, and manage customer-facing status page updates (status.xsolla.com).
• Facilitate blameless Post-Incident Reviews (PIRs) for major incidents — leading root cause identification, assigning corrective actions with clear owners and deadlines, and tracking them to closure.
• During non-incident periods, proactively analyze incident trends, recurring issues, and production bugs — identify patterns, create Problem tickets, and report findings and recommendations to product and engineering teams on a regular cadence.
• Enforce the incident management framework across the organization, including the severity model, priority matrix, SLA targets, escalation procedures, and deployment readiness gates.
• Oversee and mentor the Operations Engineer on your shift — coaching on triage, investigation, runbook execution, and documentation quality while conducting regular knowledge transfer sessions to build depth across the service portfolio.
• Produce shift handoff reports and deliver regular operational reporting: incident trends, KPI performance (MTTD, MTTA, MTTR), SLA adherence, proactive detection rate, and repeat incident analysis.
• Audit service catalogue completeness on a regular cadence and govern JIRA Service Management workflows for incident, PIR, and problem management.
• Cover for the Operations Engineer role during vacations, absences, breaks, or surge incidents — including monitoring, triage, ticket creation, and runbook execution. Participate in weekend on-call rotation for major incidents.

Qualifications and Skills

• 6+ years of experience in incident management, SRE, NOC leadership, or technical operations in a production environment supporting high-availability, high-transaction systems (payments, e-commerce, SaaS, or gaming platforms preferred).
• Proven incident management experience — coordinating multi-team response, making real-time escalation decisions, and communicating with executive stakeholders under pressure.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English — ability to draft clear, concise executive updates at 3 AM under pressure, facilitate blameless PIRs, present operational metrics to senior leadership, and communicate incident status to customers and partners with clarity and professionalism.
• Strong ITIL foundation — understanding of incident, problem, and change management lifecycles with practical experience implementing or operating ITIL-aligned workflows.
• Technical depth across the observability stack — ability to read and interpret logs, traces, and metrics in Datadog (or equivalent: Grafana, Splunk, New Relic). Understanding of APM, SLOs, error budgets, burn-rate alerting, and synthetic monitoring.
• Hands-on experience with incident tooling: Datadog, PagerDuty or OpsGenie, JIRA or JIRA Service Management, Slack, and Confluence.
• Analytical mindset — ability to identify trends, patterns, and recurring issues from incident data and translate them into actionable recommendations for product and engineering teams.
• Experience with SLA/SLO-driven operations where MTTD, MTTA, and MTTR are measured, reported, and improved.
• Experience with or strong interest in AI/ML-assisted operations: anomaly detection, alert correlation, predictive alerting, automated remediation, or self-healing automation.
• Comfort with 24x7 shift-based operations as part of a follow-the-sun model with handoff overlaps. Weekend on-call (rotating) for critical severities is required.

Nice to Have

• Experience in the gaming, payments, or fintech industry, and with customer/partner-facing incident communications and status page management.
• JIRA Service Management administration experience (workflows, SLA timers, automation rules) and familiarity with Datadog Service Catalog, scorecards, and SLOs — especially burn-rate alerts and multi-window SLOs.
• Experience building an operations function from scratch — defining processes, writing runbooks, establishing governance cadences. Background in Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (GCP preferred), microservices architecture, or distributed systems. ITIL certification (Foundation or higher) is a plus.