Desktop Operations Lead

About the Role

The Desktop Operations (DTO) Lead is a senior, hands-on leader who runs the daily operations of our Desktop Operations team. As the main escalation point for urgent and high-impact issues, you will own the quality and consistency of the team's work, help drive process improvement, and represent the team in specific meetings and projects. Our team includes both fully remote staff and members based in our physical offices, so you will also coordinate onsite project work and office-related improvements alongside the team's remote work.

This is a working-lead role rather than a formal people-management position. You will coach team members, triage and direct work, and propose operational and business decisions. Formal people-management responsibilities such as 1:1s, performance reviews, compensation, and hiring or termination decisions stay with the Desktop Operations Manager, who you will advise and support.

We hold this team to a higher standard than a typical L1 support team. Our technicians are autonomous, proactive, and accountable for their own work, which includes raising capacity concerns early and partnering with each other to redistribute work when someone needs help. As Lead, you will help hold that bar by monitoring team performance and surfacing where it is or isn't being met.

What You'll Do

Most of this role is oversight and stepping in on the exceptions, not doing everything yourself. The team owns the day-to-day work; you keep it running well, catch what needs attention, and drive improvements over time. Expect to ramp into it, getting a handle on escalations and quality first, then building out the proactive work.

Escalation and incident triage (primary focus)

• Be the main point of contact for escalations from other leaders, teams, and stakeholders.
• Step in on the situations that go beyond a single technician's scope. Technicians own and prioritize their own queues, so you focus on the exceptions, and jump in when a ticket is clearly being neglected or mishandled.
• Do a couple of quick queue sweeps a day as a safety net, watching for major or whole-office incidents, executive impact, and tickets that are aging, reopened, or near SLA. (Tickets are auto-assigned through round-robin.)
• Own coordination of major desktop and endpoint incidents through resolution.
• Handle what you can at the team level, and bring only business-critical or sign-off items to the Manager, with the context to decide.
• Spot recurring escalation themes and feed them into longer-term fixes.

Quality, standards, and metrics

• Spot-check completed tickets for quality and consistency with team standards.
• Keep an eye on documentation. Each technician updates or creates one doc a week; you make sure it is happening and that the quality holds up.
• Track team KPIs and SLAs such as resolution time, reopen rate, CSAT, backlog, and ticket aging.
• Watch performance against our higher-than-L1 bar of autonomy, proactivity, and accountability, and flag where people are excelling or slipping.
• Give the Manager a regular metrics summary that calls out trends and root causes.

Process and continuous improvement

• We are not a typical L2 team; we think of ourselves as business enablers. When we see an issue, we look for a way to handle it better next time and cut ticket volume, rather than just closing the ticket. You will help drive this alongside the team.
• Turn recurring problems into permanent fixes instead of solving the same thing repeatedly.
• With the team, propose automation and workflow improvements that reduce ticket volume and manual effort.
• Lead a project to build a proper ticket priority and impact framework: an ITIL-aligned model with end-user impact and urgency inputs, working with the Jira team to implement it.

Onsite and physical office operations

• Be the advisory and oversight point for office-related escalations and improvements. Office managers can come to you when onsite work is not being handled well.
• Coordinate office project work the Manager delegates. Day-to-day onsite work stays with the onsite technicians, who prioritize it and keep stakeholders informed.
• Stay looped in on AV and vendor activity. Onsite members coordinate directly with the AV vendor; you keep tabs and flag anything that needs attention.
• Keep an eye on office hardware and asset needs. The remote IT Asset Management team owns shipping and onsite members handle orders; you flag gaps or recurring problems.
• Keep the Manager informed of anything affecting a whole office, and bring office process changes for approval before rolling them out.

Coaching and team development

• Offer technical mentorship and coaching in the moment.
• Notice skill gaps, training needs, and workload imbalances, and advise the Manager to inform 1:1s and reviews. (Formal 1:1s, reviews, and personnel decisions stay with the Manager.)

Stakeholder and cross-team representation

• Represent Desktop Operations in specific projects or cross-team meetings the Manager delegates, bringing sign-off items back with the context to decide.
• Be a day-to-day point of contact for partner teams on the work you are handling.

How the Role Works

You will decide independently on:

• Escalation routing and triage decisions
• In-the-moment coaching and quality feedback to team members
• Day-to-day operational direction within established standards
• Office-manager escalations about onsite work, and coordination of office project work the Manager has delegated

You will recommend, with the Manager approving:

• Process, workflow, and SOP changes
• Office-related process changes and improvements, for a single site or across locations
• Tooling purchases or changes that involve spend
• Policy changes or anything that affects other teams
• Input into hiring, development plans, and performance discussions

The Manager retains:

• Formal 1:1s, performance reviews, and personnel decisions
• Compensation, hiring, and termination decisions
• Final sign-off on business decisions and budget

What You'll Bring

• At least 5 years of progressive, hands-on desktop support or desktop engineering experience.
• A track record of informal leadership, such as mentoring peers, owning incidents from start to finish, and being a trusted go-to for escalations. Formal lead or management experience is a plus but not required; this role suits a strong individual contributor ready to step into leadership.
• Strong incident management and troubleshooting skills under pressure.
• A solid grounding in desktop engineering: device management, configuration, provisioning and imaging, OS deployment, and patching.
• Familiarity with IAM principles and SSO. Our environment uses Microsoft Entra.
• Hands-on experience with endpoint and MDM tooling across Windows and Mac. We use Microsoft Intune for Windows and Mosyle for Mac, and experience with comparable platforms such as Jamf for Mac or Configuration Manager/SCCM for Windows carries over well.
• Working knowledge of ITSM and ITIL processes and tooling. We use Jira for ticketing and issue tracking and incident.io for managing major business-impacting incidents.
• Strong written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical detail to non-technical people.
• Good organizational skills and sound judgment about what to handle and what to escalate.
• Experience supporting a distributed workforce across both remote and physical office environments.

Nice to Have

• ITIL foundation or familiarity with incident, problem, and change management.
• Experience building or maintaining SOPs, runbooks, and operational documentation.
• Familiarity with reporting and metrics tooling and dashboards.

What Success Looks Like

• Escalations are handled quickly and consistently, with only the right items reaching the Manager.
• Team metrics and quality are visible and trending in the right direction.
• Recurring issues steadily decline as permanent fixes take hold.
• The team's work stays consistent and in line with standards.
• Onsite and remote members work to the same standards, and office issues are caught early.
• The team keeps moving toward a more proactive, business-enabling state.