Reliability & Problem Management Lead

We’re looking for a Reliability & Problem Management Lead to own the end-to-end lifecycle of production health across Pollard’s platforms. This role is accountable not only for the effective intake, triage, and coordination of production incidents and defects, but also for driving their systemic resolution to prevent recurrence.

Acting as the connective tissue between Business, Product, Engineering, Quality, and Operations, this role ensures that high-impact issues are addressed with urgency and discipline, while Root Cause Analysis (RCA) outcomes are translated into durable, long-term fixes that are tracked, prioritized, and delivered. Success in this role is measured by improved system reliability, reduced recurrence, and a sustained shift from reactive support to proactive prevention.

Who We Are

Pollard Digital Solutions - Europe is a full-solution supplier of lottery management and iLottery technology for lottery markets. We’re a division of Pollard Banknote Ltd - a leading partner to 60 lotteries worldwide, known for high quality instant ticket products, licensed games, retail merchandising solutions, and innovation. Established in 1907 and headquartered in Winnipeg, Canada, Pollard Banknote is publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (PBL).

Our objective is to deliver the most innovative solutions that will render industry-leading returns to good causes in an ethically responsible way. We pride ourselves on a collaborative and inclusive workplace - where creativity, team spirit, and respect are core to how we work.

What We Offer:

• A truly collaborative and supportive working environment
• Modern office space with on-site parking
• Private health insurance
• Coverage for medical treatments outside of Serbia
• Learning and development budget
• Profit sharing – every role plays a part in our success
• Budget for sports activities
• Team-building and social activities
• Employee referral bonuses
• Hybrid work environment

What You’ll Do:

Own Production Incident and Bug Intake

• Take full ownership of the operational queue for all production incidents and bugs (P1–P5), ensuring clear accountability and no loss of signal.
• Review, triage, and validate incoming issues with business and technical stakeholders to confirm severity, impact, and urgency.
• Ensure each issue is documented with clear business context, distinguishing between cosmetic issues and those with material customer, revenue, or compliance impact.

Drive Prioritization and Cross-Team Coordination

• Facilitate prioritization discussions across Business, Product, Engineering, and Quality to ensure critical reliability work is appropriately sequenced.
• Advocate for timely resolution of high-impact incidents and defects, balancing support  work against feature delivery.
• Coordinate closely with Engineering and Release Management to align fixes with safe and appropriate deployment windows.

Lead Problem Management and Recurrence Reduction

• Lead structured RCA sessions for major and recurring incidents, challenging superficial explanations and driving toward true systemic causes.
• Translate RCA outcomes into well-scoped Jira Epics and Stories that reflect durable corrective actions, not temporary mitigations.
• Track recurring incidents as formal “Problems” and maintain a visible registry of long-term corrective actions, tagged as reliability commitments.
• Follow corrective actions through to verified resolution in production, validating outcomes based on real system behavior rather than code completion alone.

Provide Clear Communication and Reporting

• Deliver clear, regular updates to stakeholders on incident status, progress, risks, and expected delivery timelines.
• Maintain a single, unified view of the support and reliability landscape.
• Escalate blockers, risks, and stalled commitments to senior leadership when necessary.

Drive Continuous Improvement

• Identify patterns and trends across incidents and defects, such as recurring failure

modes, fragile integrations, or code hotspots.

• Partner with teams to reduce defect leakage, improve test coverage, and strengthen operational readiness.
• Recommend system-level improvements that measurably reduce future support volume.

Own Process and Governance

• Evolve RCA methodologies, templates, and expectations across Pollard Engineering.
• Ensure consistency and quality in post-incident practices across teams.
• Enforce a disciplined, outcome-driven problem management process.

Champion a Culture of Prevention

• Promote proactive thinking focused on prevention over reaction.
• Partner with DevOps and CloudOps on monitoring quality, alerting effectiveness, and  operational readiness exercises.
• Help shift engineering culture toward reliability as a first-class outcome.

Who You Are:

• A systems thinker who naturally looks beyond symptoms to root causes.
• Comfortable operating at the intersection of business impact and technical depth.
• Confident facilitating difficult prioritization and RCA conversations with senior engineers and leaders.
• Persistent and outcome-driven, with a bias toward closing the loop and verifying real-world results.
• Credible, calm, and structured under pressure, especially during incidents.
• Passionate about reliability, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.

What You’ll Need:

• Significant experience in production operations, problem management, incident management, or reliability-focused roles within complex software systems.
• Strong understanding of modern software delivery environments, including microservices, cloud platforms, CI/CD, and release management.
• Strong understanding of Root Cause Analysis (RCA) frameworks (e.g., 5 Whys, Fishbone, DMAIC) and experience translating findings into actionable engineering work.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to influence
• without direct authority.
• Experience working with Jira or similar tooling to manage incidents, problems, and long-term corrective actions.
• A mindset grounded in prevention, discipline, and engineering excellence.
• Experience working with remote and hybrid teams, including onshore and offshore teams.
• 4+ years of experience working in a software development operations environment.
• A strong sense of ownership, with a focus on positive outcomes and delivery.

If you’re looking to join a company where your technical skills and ideas can make a meaningful impact, we’d love to hear from you. Apply today and let’s shape the future of digital lottery experiences together.