Soumok Sarkar

24/7 Operations Management: Provided strategic leadership to global 24/7 operations, including Infrastructure, Service Desk, and Operational Readiness teams, delivering critical services across diverse time zones and stakeholders.
Strategic Planning: Developed and executed strategies aligned with organizational objectives, fostering cross-functional collaboration and operational cohesion across specialized teams.
IT Command Center Leadership: Spearheaded the IT Command Center, overseeing incident management, major incident handling, and crisis response to minimize service disruptions and ensure business continuity.
Process Development: Led the development and refinement of processes to address critical vulnerabilities, collaborating with stakeholders to generate enterprise-wide vulnerability and incident management metrics.
Security Best Practices: Drove the adoption of security best practices, ensuring departmental compliance with industry standards and organizational security strategies.
Strategic Advisory: Acted as a strategic advisor to IT teams on patch notifications, risk assessments, and deployment strategies to mitigate security threats.
Cloud and SRE Expertise: Leveraged expertise in Cloud Migrations, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, and End-User Services to create scalable, secure IT environments across on-premise and cloud platforms.
People Management: Demonstrated exceptional people management capabilities, including talent acquisition, mentoring, training, up-skilling, and succession planning to cultivate high-performing teams.
Governance and Compliance: Established and enforced governance frameworks to ensure operational compliance with organizational policies and industry regulations.
Innovation and Problem-Solving: Championed innovation by fostering a "Yes If" mindset to solve complex business and technical problems, bridging technology with business objectives.
Collaboration and Communication: Exhibited strong collaboration, communication, and stakeholder engagement skills to align technology strategies with regional and global best practices.
Cost-Optimized Solutions: Delivered cost-optimized, scalable, and secure solutions tailored to evolving business requirements, driving impactful outcomes and improved user experiences.
Global IT Infrastructure Projects: Successfully led and optimized global IT infrastructure projects, ensuring secure and scalable environments aligned with business goals.
Operational Transition: Transitioned global operations, incident management, major incident management, and network operations center teams in-house to Bread Financial Holdings from TCS.
Governance Structures: Built strong governance structures and compliance processes that ensured adherence to security and regulatory standards.

• In my role as the Technical Operations Supervisor, I was responsible for overseeing a team of more than 40 highly skilled professionals working across various studios at Take Two and Rockstar Games. As the primary interface, I was accountable for meeting the expectations of key management stakeholders with the utmost proficiency. My responsibilities included end-to-end management of technical and administrative tasks across various verticals within the department of Online Infrastructure Support, including Global Network Operations, In-game exploit (Cheater Operations), Player Insight Analytics (PIA) (Hadoop job monitoring), Windows operations, Vendor/Partner Management, Global Security Operational Center (SOC), Corporate IT Support, Change and release management, Linux operations, and Datacenter H/W replacement and support team.
• My top priority was always to restore service and availability of infrastructure, platform, and applications across complex distributed architectures. I collaborated closely with various teams to ensure that the right steps were taken in a prioritized manner, and worked with Online Operations and DevOps teams to support cloud-based and bare-metal infrastructure platforms to identify and drive continuous improvement efforts towards automation and self-healing. Conducting Post Incident Reviews (PIRs) was a crucial part of my job, enabling me to identify and improve upon any gaps in People, Process, and Technology to reduce MTTD, MTTA/MTTE, and MTTR. I placed great importance on Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and Permanent fix measures for INCs to reduce the frequency of failures and increase the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF).
• As a key member of the management team, I had the Executive Authority to approve Emergency Break Fix (EBF) or rollback changes to mitigate INCs and restore service. I also developed and drove Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plans, tests, and activities to ensure that various teams executed their playbooks in a timely and sequential manner. In addition to reducing the frequency of INCs, I worked towards improving the stability and resiliency of Infrastructure Systems, Applications, and Services. I collaborated closely with stakeholders to identify and resolve gaps, bottlenecks, and areas of failures. I also spearheaded the organizational restructuring of functional teams into separate verticals based on their deliverables, creating hierarchies, career growth paths, and internal job posting possibilities within the verticals.
• As part of my job, I developed high-level Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Key Performance Indicators (KPI), and Policy documents for leadership, resulting in increased management visibility of problematic areas encountered by the operation teams and driving strategic problem resolution. I provided detailed reports to management, including metrics, staffing projections, and root cause analysis. Additionally, I performed essential workflow management duties such as schedule management, leave management, report management, compliance management, and training logistics. Another significant responsibility was allocating and managing budgets for resources, tools, training, and hardware to facilitate short and long-term growth and improvement. I researched and developed cost efficiencies to keep monitoring and operating expenses within budget and managed continuous improvement. I also conducted scope assessments and implemented multiple monitoring and ticketing applications.
• Allocating and managing budgets for resources, tools, training, and hardware to facilitate short and long-term growth and improvement. I researched and developed cost efficiencies to keep monitoring and operating expenses within budget and managed continuous improvement. I also conducted scope assessments and implemented multiple monitoring and ticketing applications to ensure the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of our products, services, and data.
• Overseeing Organizational Development, which involved managing recruiting, personnel management, goal setting, training, coaching, mentoring, employee engagement and satisfaction, retention, etc.
• Acting as a 24x7 on-call SPOC and additional resource for front-line monitoring and support for all the verticals mentioned above, ensuring seamless and uninterrupted services.

• As a Senior Operations and Tech Support professional, I have successfully executed a comprehensive process transition plan for AppDynamics monitoring and integration with ServiceNow (SNOW), ensuring seamless implementation and operation for the organization. I have also created standard operating procedures (SOPs) for AppDynamics monitoring and SNOW integration, incorporating industry best practices.
• In addition, I collaborated with onsite teams to define the escalation matrix for outage management process, outlining clear and concise escalation paths for timely and effective issue resolution. I continuously reviewed and improved the escalation matrix to align with organizational objectives and meet service level agreements.

My key accomplishments include:

• Developing and executing a comprehensive process transition plan for AppDynamics monitoring and integration with SNOW.
• Creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) for AppDynamics monitoring and SNOW integration, incorporating industry best practices.
• Collaborating with onsite teams to define the escalation matrix for outage management process.
• Continuously reviewing and improving the escalation matrix to align with organizational objectives and meet service level agreements.

• Successfully support and maintain the digital infrastructure of multiple data centers and rendering farms.
• Perform end-to-end lifecycle management of incidents, problems, and changes to ensure optimal system performance.
• Proactively manage capacity of disk drives of Linux-based servers to maintain system efficiency.
• Monitor the health of high-priority Linux production servers deployed over multiple data centers.

• Providing Remote Infrastructure Support: Providing remote infrastructure support across global datacenters using industry-standard monitoring and support tools, ensuring the availability and reliability of the IT infrastructure.
• Load-Balancing Activities: Performing load-balancing activities among live and backup servers, ensuring smooth and efficient operations.
• Patching Activities: Performing patching activities such as Windows, Linux, SQL Server patching to maintain a secure and stable infrastructure.
• Team Leadership and Quality Assurance: Serving as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) to a team of 10 members and responsible for maintaining the quality of tickets by performing daily checks and audits and following ITIL best practices.
• Generating weekly and monthly outage reports to senior management.
• Job Scheduling and Monitoring: Canceling and restarting backup jobs through TWS.
• Monitoring 20,000+ batch jobs running on Windows/Linux servers using Job Scheduling Console, ensuring the successful completion of jobs within the required timeframes.

• Developed and implemented URL Check Application: Used HTML and JavaScript to create an application that tests the availability of client-side web applications. Reduced six hours of manual effort per day.
• End-to-End Incident, Problem, and Change Management: Managed and resolved incidents, problems, and changes from start to finish.
• Monitoring Batch Flow in BMC Control-M Enterprise: Monitored batch flow using BMC Control-M Enterprise. Performed Rerun/Hold/Kill on batch or jobs as per the client's requests.
• L1 and L2 Application and Remote Server Support: Provided L1 and L2 support for applications and remote servers.
• Executing Batch Jobs: Executed batch jobs following the job schedule.
• Backup Monitoring/Failure Management and Media Recall Support: Monitored backups and managed failures. Provided media recall support from vendors.