IT Operations and Reliability Manager (W/M)

Company Description

As a global key player in yeasts and fermentation, Lesaffre designs, manufactures and markets innovative solutions for Baking, Food taste & pleasure, Health care and Biotechnology.

Family group born in northern France in 1853, now a multi-national and a multicultural company, Lesaffre is committed to working with confidence to better nourish and protect the planet.
In close collaboration with its clients and partners, Lesaffre employs 11 700 people in more than 50 countries.

Lesaffre achieves a turnover of 3,2 billion euros.

Job Description

At Lesaffre, Digital, Data & Tech (DDTech) is a fundamental transformative force for Lesaffre growth. It is a lever to increase customer centricity and user experience, achieve operational excellence, supercharge R&D, and empower our teams across the entire company.

This transformation runs on a growing multi-cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure), a SAP ecosystem in production, engineering squads that ship continuously, and a portfolio of managed service partners. The stability of the Run, the control of costs, and the reliability of our partners are daily, concrete stakes that can no longer rest on informal or fragmented practices.

Support of the information system is delivered by several autonomous teams (Support, SAP, Infrastructure, Platform), each on its own scope. For the whole to work coherently, we need a central role able to coordinate these teams, steer the overall quality of the Run, and raise the alarm when something drifts.

In this context, Lesaffre is recruiting an IT Operations & Reliability Manager.

This is a cross-functional role at the center of a federated operating model. You do not run the support of every system yourself; you set the standards, operate within your own scope, and make sure the autonomous teams work as one: consistent escalation paths, clean hand-offs, and disciplined arbitration of cross-team priorities. Your authority comes from the quality of your analysis, the clarity of your processes, and your ability to align autonomous teams toward a common objective, not from hierarchical reporting lines.

Key Responsibilities: 

Run Management & System Stability

• Steer the Run: Drive the overall quality of the Run across the information system: track availability, performance, and reliability indicators of the services in production (major applications such as SAP, AWS Cloud environments, etc.).
• Observability: Deploy and run the Group observability chain (OpenTelemetry, Grafana, system monitoring tools): collect, correlate, and make legible the signals from every team, for both engineering teams and management (KPIs to be established).
• Crisis Command: Take the lead during major cross-team operational incidents; delegate technical coordination to the Group Infrastructure lead when the incident is localized on that scope.
• Cross-Team Coordination: Coordinate the Support, SAP, Infrastructure, and Platform teams on hand-offs, escalations, and arbitration of cross-team priorities.
• Post-Incident Learning: Run post-incident analyses together with the teams involved and follow the corrective action plans through to closure.
• Continuous Improvement: Drive a continuous improvement approach to the Run together with the teams concerned: identify priority areas, build the action plan, and follow it through to closure.
• Executive Reporting: Produce a quarterly Run health report: major incidents, SLA adherence, trends, costs, and corrective actions in progress.
• Technical Committees: Take part in the various technical committees with the teams in charge and the associated service providers.
• Maintenance Planning: Contribute to the planning of major maintenance operations involving several teams.
• Subsidiaries & Regions: Coordinate maintenance activities with the subsidiaries and regions.

Resilience & Operational Continuity

• Operational Resilience: Build and maintain a clear view of how critical technology can keep operating under major disruptions (data center outage, regional cloud failure, loss of connectivity or supply).
• Geopolitical & Sovereignty Risk: Anticipate scenarios where access to key technologies or providers could be constrained (geopolitical restrictions, politically blocked access to AI models or SaaS) and define credible fallback options.
• Continuity Planning: Work with the Infrastructure, SAP, and Platform teams to ensure disaster recovery and business continuity plans are defined, tested, and kept current.
• Robustness by Design: Promote architectural and operational choices that reduce single points of failure and critical vendor lock-in.

ITSM Governance

• Common Processes: Propose and align common ITSM processes (Incident, Problem, Change) across all teams: set a frame of operational stability while preserving the agility of the delivery teams.
• Escalation Rules: Contribute to establishing, with each team, the cross-team escalation rules: who receives what, within what time, at what priority level.
• Standards & Tooling: Run and operate the ITSM standards (Jira Service Management) for your own team: workflows, categorizations, SLAs, reporting. Contribute to their adoption by the other teams.
• Service SLAs: Contribute to defining the service SLAs between Engineering & Infrastructure and its internal customers: local IT, Business Units, and business functions.

FinOps & Cost Control

• Consumption Steering: Ensure the monitoring, analysis, and steering of Cloud consumption (AWS, Azure, Snowflake) and of hosting partners (OXYA and others), in coordination with the teams concerned.
• Budget Alerts: Configure budget drift alerts and escalate any overrun to the Head of Engineering.
• Optimization Policy: Drive and ensure the implementation of a Cloud cost optimization policy: build the action plan, coordinate its rollout with the teams, and measure the gains.
• Licensing: Manage software licenses: optimization, renewals, and control of usage compliance.
• Tagging Policy: Define and drive the adoption of a Cloud resource tagging policy across the whole information system, to ensure traceability and allocation of spend.
• FinOps Reporting: Build and share consolidated FinOps reporting for engineering teams and management.

MSP Partner Governance

• Contract Governance: Ensure the contractual governance of MSP partners in collaboration with the teams concerned: steering committees, KPI and SLA tracking, application of penalties, and negotiation of amendments and renewals with Procurement.

Financial Management

• Run & Operations Budget: Steward the Run and operations budget scope (Cloud, hosting, observability, MSP), owning the consolidated financial view rather than the day-to-day FinOps execution.
• Vendor Value: Assess the cost-versus-value of MSP and hosting contracts and feed this into renewals and negotiations led with Procurement.
• Investment Cases: Build business cases for reliability, observability, and continuity investments (tooling, redundancy, DR capabilities), quantifying risk reduction and expected savings.

Performance Measurement & Reporting

• Reliability Metrics: Define and maintain Run-health and reliability metrics (availability, MTTR, SLA adherence, incident recurrence) across the federated support model.
• Cost & Continuity KPIs: Track FinOps and continuity indicators (cost trends per scope, DR test coverage) and surface them in consolidated dashboards.
• Executive Reporting: Report Run health, reliability posture, and cost trends to the Head of Engineering & Infrastructure and senior stakeholders, and communicate the ROI of operations initiatives.

Qualifications

Required Skills & Experience:  

• Experience: 12+ years in IT production, SRE, or IT operations management within a multi-vendor Cloud environment.
• Observability: Hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry and Grafana (or equivalent) for collecting, correlating, and visualizing production signals.
• ITSM Practice: Practice of ITIL processes (Incident, Problem, Change Management) in an environment with several distinct support teams.
• FinOps: Cloud FinOps: consumption monitoring and analysis, cost steering, tagging policy (AWS, Azure, Snowflake). FinOps Practitioner certification appreciated.
• ITSM Platform: Jira Service Management.
• SAP Awareness: Experience in an environment with SAP in production: understand the availability stakes and escalations without being the technical expert.
• Coordination: Proven ability to operate an ITSM model across multiple teams: hand-offs, escalations, arbitration of cross-team priorities without hierarchical authority.
• Vendor Management: Experience steering MSP partners or complex managed-service contracts: SLA tracking, gap management, contractual negotiation.
• Communication: Ability to build operational and financial reporting legible by non-technical audiences, and to remain calm and decisive during major incidents.
• Languages: Fluent in English and French (written and spoken) is mandatory for local collaboration and global documentation.

Nice-to-Have Skills :

• FinOps Practitioner certification or equivalent cloud cost-management credential.
• Background as a hands-on SRE, DevOps, or infrastructure engineer.
• Experience structuring or refounding ITSM processes in a federated support model.
• Familiarity with SAP Cloud cost tracking (SAP BTP, BTC).

There is no such thing as a ‘perfect’ candidate. Lesaffre is a place where you can grow and in which whatever background you come with will be a plus. If you feel excited about the position, we strongly encourage you to apply even if you meet only two thirds of the requirements.

Additional Information

What can Lesaffre offer you: 

• We are a successful family-owned company with long-standing history where people truly matter. 
• We promote a sense of fulfilment with a genuine mission: nourish and protect the planet. 
• An opportunity to work in a real international environment. 

All our jobs are open to people with disabilities.

At Lesaffre, diversity is a strength that enriches our culture and our teams. We are committed to offering you a work environment where you can thrive, regardless of your background, gender, age or abilities. We encourage all applications, as we believe that diverse perspectives strengthen our ability to innovate and meet the challenges of tomorrow.