Software – VP Saas Operations

Stonewood Group Inc.; Ottawa; On-site; CAD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading tech start-up in Ottawa seeks a Vice President of SaaS Operations to oversee the management of multi-faceted operations teams and optimize the performance of its innovative virtualization solutions. The ideal candidate will have over ten years of experience in SaaS environments, combining leadership capabilities with strong technical understanding, ensuring high-quality service for key clients while fostering a dynamic team culture.

Benefits

Base + bonus + equity based on experience

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in SaaS applications management.
• Experience in a mobile or advertising-based software company preferred.
• Strong team player and capable of providing global support.

Responsibilities

• Build an operations team in Ottawa and Beijing.
• Manage Client and third-party services operations.
• Develop dashboards and reports for operations status.

Skills

Leadership

Technical Documentation

Cloud Security

Data Analysis

Customer-Oriented

Team Collaboration

Education

B.S. degree in Computer Science or Engineering

MBA

Job description

About Client
Client is an Ottawa based software start-up, developing an innovative virtualization solution for Android devices. It allows virtual phones with different apps and data to co-exist on a single device. The virtual phones are downloaded and managed via a SaaS service.
Android OEMs have to address the requirements of multiple interest groups including consumers, mobile operators, enterprise and app partners. At the same time consumers want to use their devices for multiple purposes, work, mobile banking/payment, games and social networking while the concerns over Android security and privacy continues to grow.
Client is partnering with Android OEMs around the globe to address their requirements as well as the requirements of consumers, mobile operators, enterprises and mobile app providers. Client has recently partnered one of the largest smartphone OEM in world.

Scope of Position
Reporting to the President & CEO, the Vice President, SaaS Operations will be expected to build a team to manage all aspects of the downloaded Spaces, including (i) the creation, update and monetization of downloaded Spaces in collaboration with customers, resellers and product management, (ii) the analysis and processing of data from multiple sources into actionable activities, as well as (iii) the maintenance, deployment, management and troubleshooting of the various servers.
The servers include Client’s Secure Spaces SaaS, as well interfacing with third party app stores, analytic services and ad networks. You are expected to be data driven, actively gathering data from multiple sources and to draw insights to drive feature development, increase user acquisition and increase revenue. Client uses Amazon Web Services and has instances running around the world, including their Beijing data centers to avoid issues with the Great Firewall.
You will be working with a dynamic and highly experienced team in the friendly and flexible environment of an emerging start-up, and your responsibilities will include all aspects of operations. As key customers are based in China, some travel will be needed and calls will need to be held outside of typical working hours.

Success in the position will require demonstrated competence in the following:

Planning and Objective Setting
Systematic in approach to work; Produces action plans in which objectives are defined and steps for achieving them are clearly specified; Plans by breaking down large task into subtasks; Develops plans that anticipate obstacles; Is realistic about time-scales and builds in appropriate checkpoints, milestones and controls in order to ensure that desired results are realized.

Role Expertise
Demonstrates critical technical or professional knowledge/skills related to the role; Has thorough knowledge of relevant products, services and methods; Willing to get hands-on if needed. Expands technical knowledge/skills and keeps up-to-date in own area of expertise.

Strategic Approach
Develops a strategic plan to realize the vision; Revises strategy in light of changing circumstances; Takes a long-term view of organizational success; Works to clarify long term organizational goals; Able to stand back from immediate problems in order to focus on more far reaching ideas.

Customer/Client Orientation
Strives to provide customers/clients with personalized and efficient service; Anticipates customers’/clients’ needs; Quickly follows up on customer/client contacts and complaints; Monitors and acts on measures of customer/client satisfaction.

Results Orientation
Focuses strongly on achieving agreed upon outcomes and ensures that key objectives are met; Conveys a sense of urgency and drives issues to closure; Aims to improve upon past performance; Establishes aggressive personal targets and strives to achieve them.

Team Skills
Helps to create a sense of team spirit and harmonious relations through cooperation and support; Leads and builds an effective global team; Fosters collaboration among team members.

Responsibilities

• Build an Operations team in both Ottawa and Beijing and establish and document the necessary roles, responsibilities and procedures and practices for the team
• Support, operate and troubleshoot a range of Client and 3rd party services
  • Secure Spaces servers
  • Ad networks
  • App stores
  • Data Analytics gathered from multiple sources
• Support, deploy and operate Client trial and production servers
  • Ongoing daily updating and pushing of policy and apps to devices in the field
  • Testing of policy updates to actual customer devices to ensure reliability
  • Changing content, ads and policies in support of monetization goals
• Build a production team to operate, update and monetize Spaces in collaboration with marketing
• Working with customers, sales, marketing and product management to define, create, test, deploy and monetize new Spaces
• Using all sources of data to provide reports, trends and insights to analyze the success of deployments, drive features, focus production activities and increase revenues
• Establishing production procedures and processes to ensure error free production environment
• Share insights with the executive team to help improve user experience, adoption and revenue based on data from reviewing logs, tracking down issues, identifying usage trends and behavior
• Monitoring, managing and reporting for production and trial servers, app store and client operations, usage and reliability;
• Implementation of processes for change, security and recovery management;
• Partner with Global Services and Support teams to provide world class support, leading edge technical capabilities and compute service delivery and management
• Development of dashboards and reports to help communicate the operations status and usage trends of the production systems;
• Evaluation and recommendation of additional tools and services to help improve the Operations activities;
• SaaS cost reporting and identification of potential savings

Preferred Experience / Education

The following indicates specific industry, academic and functional experience/qualifications that are important to the successful achievement of the identified responsibilities and performance deliverables.

• B.S. degree in Computer Science or Engineering and / or technical discipline from an accredited college / university; MBA would be considered an asset.
• 10+ years of experience in a related function is preferred, a portion of which ideally within a mobile or advertising based software company
• 5+ years of experience managing high-volume customer-facing SaaS applications is required; work-related experience with mobile is also essential.
• Continuous integration/deployment in large cloud/SaaS environments
• Work-related knowledge of system provisioning, automation, configuration management and cloud security
• Leadership and management experience of a 24/7, high-availability production environment is highly desirable
• Demonstrated ability to write technical documentation easily consumed by a non-technical audience
• Demonstrated ability to effectively communicate plans, roadmaps and strategies with customers
• Strong team player capable of providing support and training to assist others across global regions
• Willing/able to provide after hours, on-call client support

Remuneration and Benefits

• Base + bonus + equity based on experience