Service Desk Lead - Application Support

Company DescriptionOpen Innovation AI is a global technology company that specializes in developing advanced solutions for managing AI workloads. Its flagship product, the Open Innovation Cluster Manager (OICM), orchestrates complex AI tasks efficiently across diverse infrastructures. The platform is hardware-agnostic, optimized for various GPUs and accelerators hardware, and facilitates seamless integration and scalability for enterprise AI applications. Open Innovation AI focuses on optimizing and simplifying AI workload management and making AI technologies accessible to organizations of all sizes. With its innovative solutions, companies can reduce operational costs, accelerate time to value, and maximize their return on investment, ensuring that their AI strategies contribute directly to enhanced business outcomesRole Overview:The Service Desk Lead is responsible for establishing and leading the Service Desk team, including defining support workflows, communication channels, triage procedures, and service-level alignment. This role ensures the delivery of high-quality customer support through well-structured processes, effective coordination with L1/L2/L3 teams, and continuous improvement of operational efficiency.The Service Desk Lead will set up and supervise support channels, ensure consistent triage and ticket handling, and oversee smooth coordination across support levels. The role requires exceptional communication skills as the primary competency, along with strong operational discipline, and the ability to build a customer-focused service culture.Role Responsibilities: Lead the Service Desk team, including establishing and fine-tuning processes, workflows, SLAs, ticket categorization, and support-level handoffs.Set up and manage support channels such as Jira Service Management, email queues, phone/hotline support, and monitoring-alert integrations.Develop and maintain triage procedures to ensure efficient prioritization and routing of tickets across L1–L3 teams.Lead daily Service Desk operations including ticket assignment, workload balancing, shift rota and coverage, and SLA adherence.Define which classes of issue the Service Desk resolves at first contact, and ensure the runbooks and knowledge base articles exist to make that achievable.Act as the technical escalation point on the Service Desk: review issues an analyst cannot resolve, judge whether the behavior is documented, and confirm the escalation is warranted before it reaches L2 or L3.Create and maintain SOPs, runbooks, and user guides that support consistent and high-quality support operations, authoring technical content directly from the official product documentation.Monitor service performance dashboards, KPIs, and ticket trends, including first-contact resolution and escalation rework rate, to identify improvement opportunities and ensure high communication standards in all interactions.Conduct regular quality reviews of ticket handling, technical accuracy of responses, and clarity of communication across the team.Support onboarding and continuous training of L1/L2 engineers on Service Desk workflows, communication protocols, tool usage, and platform functionality.Maintain and enhance the knowledge base to ensure accurate, accessible troubleshooting guides and service documentation.Coordinate with Technical Operations, Engineering, and Product teams to ensure efficient issue resolution and alignment on support processes.Prepare weekly and monthly Service Desk performance reports for management, focusing on service quality, communication effectiveness, and operational KPIs.Drive continuous improvement initiatives to enhance support efficiency, user experience, and overall operational maturityRequired Qualification, Experience, Competence and Certifications Bachelor’s degree, preferably in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.5+ years of experience in IT Service Desk, technical support, or service operations roles, including experience supporting a software product or platform.Experience in building or leading a Service Desk function is a significant advantage.Outstanding communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to manage expectations, ensure clarity, and maintain high-quality interactions across teams and customers.Hands-on experience with ITSM tools such as Jira Service Management, ServiceNow, or similar platforms.Strong understanding of ITIL practices (incident, request, problem, and change management).Demonstrated ability to design and document SOPs, workflows, and knowledge base articles, working from official product documentation.Conceptual understanding of Kubernetes: containers, pods, nodes, namespaces, and the meaning of common states such as Pending, CrashLoopBackOff, and OOMKilled. Cluster administration experience is not required.Comfortable on the Linux command line, able to read application and container logs, and able to interpret HTTP status codes, API responses, YAML, and JSON files.Understanding of AI/ML workload fundamentals, including training, fine-tuning, inference, model serving runtimes, checkpoints, tokenization and context length, as well as GPU memory requirements and their impact on workload stability and job failures.Analytical mindset with experience monitoring SLAs, KPIs, and operational metrics.Leadership capability with experience coaching or guiding L1/L2 support engineers.Ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams including Engineering, Operations, and Product.Exposure to any of the following is an advantage: GPU or high-performance computing workloads, observability tooling such as Grafana, and enough Python to read a script and spot an obvious error.Certifications such as ITIL Foundation, HDI Support Center Lead (SCL), or Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) are preferred.Reporting To: Head of Technical OperationsManages: The L1 Service Desk team.