URBN Senior Manager of Technology Operations

URBN is seeking a Senior Manager of Technology Operations who will be a strategic, high-velocity leader responsible for establishing and continuously elevating operational excellence and continuity across URBN Technology’s global enterprise. This role demands a strong systems and process mindset while maintaining an aggressive bias toward action and a mandate to leverage agentic AI and automation. The Senior Manager will drive operational maturity by leading the functions of Incident Management and Critical Path Resilience and Intelligent Operational Optimization, ensuring the stability, performance, and scalability of our most critical retail systems.

This role leads the strategy, implementation, and governance of our operational function, focusing on both foundational discipline and future-state automation.

1. Incident Management and Critical Path Resilience

• Process Discipline and Triage: Define, implement, and enforce robust triage processes, coordinating resolution efforts effectively across diverse, multi-functional teams (software, network, infrastructure) to dramatically improve incident coordination and reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).
• Critical Path Definition: Partner with Engineering and Business leadership to formally define the critical path and dependency relationships for our most business-impacting workflows (e.g., checkout, fulfillment, payment) and implement specialized resilience protocols around them.
• Proactive Detection and Prevention: Aggressively build better processes around leveraging the signals, logs, and metrics we already possess for proactive detection, turning latent data into actionable intelligence for prevention.
• Action-Oriented Incident Ownership: Own the entire high-severity incident lifecycle, driving swift, clear action from identification through resolution, while ensuring thorough post-incident analysis and long-term mitigation.
• Executive Communication: Establish a rigorous cadence of clear, concise issue communications to the business, detailing impact and progress on resolved and in-progress incidents.

2. Intelligent Operational Optimization

• Automation-First Maturity: Drive a mindset of scalable operational maturity by implementing processes, tools, and automation—with a mandate for agentic AI integration—to improve reliability, eliminate operational toil, and increase efficiency.
• Accountability and KPI Governance: Govern operational accountability by partnering with engineering teams to establish crystal-clear visibility on the relationship of each critical system to core business and technology Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Champion the review of these metrics to drive continuous improvement.
• Systems Mindset: Oversee the operational integration across complex, interconnected retail systems (e.g., ERP, eCommerce, WMS), ensuring holistic process discipline and operational health end-to-end.
• Data-Driven Improvement: Implement, track, and review operational metrics, SLAs, and SLOs, using data-driven insights to measure impact, optimize over time, and hold technical teams accountable for continuous improvement.

3. Leadership and Strategic Alignment

• Provide visionary leadership focused on speed, quality, and execution to the Operations function, fostering a culture of disciplined innovation and continuous automation.
• Partner closely with engineering and product leads to embed operational and AI-driven capabilities into the development lifecycle, ensuring systems are built for intelligent, resilient operation.
• Serve as a key escalation point for critical operational challenges, navigating complex technical and business decisions with clarity and decisiveness.

• 8+ years of progressive experience in enterprise Operations, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or a related discipline, with significant experience operating in a leadership capacity across a large, global enterprise.
• Demonstrated success in leading an Incident Management practice focused on process discipline, multi-team coordination, and leveraging data for proactive mitigation.
• Strong process and systems mindset combined with experience driving Operational Optimization and measurable improvement in reliability and performance.
• Deep understanding of retail systems architecture (e.g., POS, Order Management, Supply Chain) and the critical dependency relationships across these systems is a strong preference.
• Broad technical knowledge spanning software engineering, network engineering, and complex enterprise systems.
• Exceptional leadership, communication, and strategic thinking skills, with the ability to clearly articulate operational strategies and AI roadmaps to both technical and executive audiences.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.

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URBN offers comprehensive Perks & Benefits to employees. Availability and eligibility to specific benefits may be subject to your location and employment status. Benefits include medical, dental, vision, PTO, generous employee discounts, retirement savings and much more! For additional information visit www.urbn.com/work-with-us/benefits

URBN celebrates diversity and is committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We are proud to provide equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, sex (including gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity or expression), religion, creed, age, physical or mental disability, national origin or ancestry, ethnicity, citizenship, service in the uniformed services, genetic information, or any other protected characteristic as established by law. We believe strongly in fostering a safe, fair and respectful work environment. To ensure compliance with our non-discrimination and anti-harassment policies, we offer anti-harassment training to managers and employees.