Senior Director, Service Delivery and Quality

The Senior Director, Service Delivery & Quality is the senior leader accountable for how our delivery organization serves its largest public-safety customer - owning service quality, release governance, problem management, and the teams that deliver them: QA, support, release/program management, and business analysis.

Essential Responsibilities/Duties:

Organizational Leadership

• Directly manage and develop the QA, support, release/program management, and business analysis functions
• Build the QA function from its current two-analyst state into an automation-first quality practice covering a ~20-application mission-critical portfolio
• Grow the support function from help-desk operations into a structured incident and problem management practice
• Develop the BA team toward embedded product ownership within application teams
• Build functions that run on documented process

Release Governance

• Govern the published release train - the single Forward Schedule of Change shared with the client - operated day-to-day by a release conductor role on the Senior Director's team
• Own release gate policy, working with engineering/platform teams to ensure enforcement is automated in the delivery pipeline.

Incident & Problem Management

• Build and own the end-to-end problem management practice: formal Problem Records for every Priority 1 and Major Incident (timeline, multi-layer causation, corrective actions with owners and deadlines, prevention plan, verified closure)
• Deliver Root Cause Analysis reports within 5 business days of incident resolution, shared transparently with client leadership
• Enforce 30-day closure verification before problem records close
• Establish and own the Known Error Database (KEDB)
• Define incident communication protocols with structured escalation paths
• Chair the Monthly Stability Review with client leadership; lead the Quarterly Executive Briefing jointly with account leadership

Quality Assurance

• Define and own the QA governance framework: testing standards, validation coverage requirements, and defect management - weighted by service criticality tier
• Champion automation-first quality: characterization tests, contract tests, and pipeline-integrated validation as the primary quality mechanism, with structured manual testing where automation doesn't reach
• Own defect management governance - triage, prioritization, SLA-aligned resolution, and shared client visibility through common tooling
• Jointly establish validation coverage targets with client stakeholders and hold delivery teams accountable to them

Metrics & Reporting

• Own the organization's delivery and service metrics program: DORA metrics (deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, time to restore) alongside ITSM measures (incident recurrence, RCA timeliness, escape rate)
• Lead the joint definition, baselining, and agreement of program KPIs with client leadership - building the instrumentation where no baseline exists today
• Establish written-by-default reporting: dashboards and written status artifacts as byproducts of the work, replacing status meetings
• Own the client-facing reporting dashboard

Risk & Modernization Governance

• Maintain the Service Risk Register as a living document, reviewed jointly with client stakeholders
• Govern the service prioritization/tiering exercise with client leadership (Tier 1 Mission Critical / Tier 2 Operationally Important / Tier 3 Supporting) that sequences QA coverage and release scrutiny
• Track and report modernization and remediation progress at executive level; chair quarterly service risk reviews
• Govern adoption of shared ITSM tooling (ServiceNowJira integration) providing the client real-time visibility into incidents, problems, changes, and defects

Stakeholder Management

• Serve as the single point of accountability for service quality - the escalation point for unresolved quality or stability issues
• Note the scope: account leadership owns the overall client relationship, and application leads are client-facing for their applications. This role is the quality and service-governance voice in client forums, not the sole client interface
• Build trusted relationships with client operational and executive leadership, internal delivery teams, and the engineering and platform leaders alongside whom this role operates as a peer
• Produce and present executive reporting at the monthly and quarterly governance cadence

Qualifications:

Essential

• Director-level (or equivalent) experience in service delivery, service management, or delivery operations within a complex, mission-critical, multi-stakeholder environment
• Experience running service governance within a modern CI/CD delivery model - automated gates, pipeline-generated evidence, trunk/train release models - and fluency in DORA metrics alongside ITIL measures
• Demonstrated experience building functions from scratch or near-scratch - not only running established ones
• Deep expertise in incident, problem, and change management, with the credibility to lead their adoption in an organization that has never had them
• Line-management experience across mixed functions (QA, support, PM/BA)
• Executive stakeholder capability - presence, communication, and judgment to operate credibly with senior client leadership
• Strong analytical capability - able to build a metrics program where none exists and use it to drive decisions
• A writing-first operating style: documented decisions, written status, artifacts over meetings
• Prior experience with AI, or readiness to learn and utilize AI tools for job-related tasks

Desirable

• Public-sector or public-safety client experience
• Experience in managed service environments with direct client accountability
• Experience during a legacy modernization or platform consolidation program (governing quality through a migration)
• Proficiency with ServiceNow, Jira, TestRail, and executive reporting tooling

Location: New York City Area or within commute distance

Travel: required travel to NYC-based customer as needed.

Hybrid Workplace

SoundThinking follows a hybrid schedule for employees who live equal to or less than 50 miles from one of our office locations, which include Fremont, CA, Tucson, AZ, Washington, D.C., Orlando, Florida, or Iselin, NJ. Employees are expected to work onsite for a minimum of 3 days per week, unless the advertised role has a specific on-site requirement. The specific days for in-office are dependent on the office location.

Compensation: At SoundThinking, we are committed to equitable compensation practices and consider a variety of factors, including skills, experience, and work location. The typical base salary range for this role is $190,000 - $210,000 annually. This range reflects base salary only and does not include bonus, sales incentives, equity, or benefits, where applicable. The shared salary range is based on a good faith estimate made at the time of publication and may be modified in the future. The pay offered to a candidate may vary within this range depending on factors such as education, experience, and geographic location.

Note: The Company reserves exclusive right in its sole discretion to modify, adjust, delete, add or otherwise change the above at any time.

SoundThinking provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetics. In addition to federal law requirements, SoundThinking complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training. SoundThinking maintains a drug-free workplace policy.

SoundThinking expressly prohibits any form of workplace harassment based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status. Improper interference with the ability of SoundThinking's employees to perform their job duties may result in discipline up to and including discharge.

If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are limited in the ability or unable to access or use this online application process and need an alternative method for applying, you may contact SoundThinking at careers@soundthinking.com for assistance.